Koropokkuru

This is Ainu — the tradition of the Indigenous people of Hokkaido — and it is told here as theirs.

The people who were here first

Before the Ainu, the Ainu say, there were others.

Small people. They lived in pit-dwellings dug into the ground, and they were skilled fishers and hunters.

And they traded — but only in the dark. They would leave deer, fish, and game outside Ainu dwellings at night, and take what was offered in return, and go. They preferred never to be seen, and for a long time that arrangement held.

How it ended

One young Ainu man decided he wanted to look at one.

He waited, and when a koropokkur woman came with the night's delivery, he seized her and held her so he could see her face.

And that was the end of it.

Their people have not been seen since.

No war, no curse, no punishment. A relationship built entirely on being left alone, ended permanently by one person's curiosity — and the other party simply withdrew.

But the pits are still there

Here's what makes this more than a story about small people.

The legend says their pit-dwellings, their pottery, and their stone tools are still scattered across the landscape.

And they are. Those things are genuinely there, all over Hokkaido, and anyone walking the country can find them.

So this is a myth that points at real archaeology and tells you whose it was.

That's a rarer kind of story than it sounds. Most origin legends explain a landscape feature or a custom. This one explains a material record — physical remains, in quantity, that people were finding and holding and wondering about, and gives them an owner and a reason for their absence.

The Meiji controversy

Which is exactly why it caused an argument.

In the Meiji period the anthropologist Tsuboi Shōgorō took the legend literally: a genuine pre-Ainu race, evidenced by the Jōmon-period artifacts turning up everywhere. It became a famous scholarly controversy.

The refutation is now settled and it's better than the theory. The Ainu themselves built pit-dwellings.

The remains are their own architectural past.

Which means the koropokkuru legend is a people's memory of their own earlier way of living, estranged — the ancestors' houses become the houses of a different, smaller, shyer people who went away.

That's an extraordinary thing for a tradition to do, and it isn't unique to Ainu folklore: cultures across the world explain their own abandoned structures as somebody else's. But rarely with this much material still lying on the ground.

The butterbur

One last thing, because it's how most people meet them.

The beloved folk etymology reads the name as "people under the butterbur leaves" — the giant fuki, whose leaves in Hokkaido really do grow big enough to shelter a small person, and are held over the head as umbrellas by children in every photograph of the plant.

Linguistic analysis prefers Korpok-un-kur, "people dwelling below" — underground, matching the pit-houses, not the plants.

The linguists are probably right. But the butterbur image is itself folklore now, a century deep, and it's on the mascots and the signage — so keep both, and note which is which.