1) Fascinating story. I had no idea the Ainu existed. Their way of life seems very reminiscent of the Haida and other indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest.
2) I thought the author's description of the iyomante was precious and patronizing. TLDR: according to the article, the iyomante is the ritualized slaughter of an adult bear that has been taken from its mother as an infant and raised in confined captivity. It's not a quick death, according to the article:
> At the start of the ceremony, an elder offered a prayer first to the goddess of the fire and hearth, Fuchi. The elder led the men to the bear cage. They prayed. They released the bear to exercise and play, then shot him with two blunt arrows before strangling and beheading him, freeing the spirit. People feasted, they danced, they sang. They decorated the head and an old woman recited sagas of Ainu Mosir, the floating world that rested on the back of a fish.
I get that knowing how this ceremony was carried out is extremely important anthropologically, and there's something to admire in the extent to which the Ainu were connected to the ecosystem in which they lived. That said, I thought the article really went out of its way to romanticize the captivity and torture of a non-domesticated wild animal.
Reminds me of Hopi rituals involving the capture, raising, and sacrifice of eagles. Even though it's a long tradition that's important to their culture, the reaction is always close to "wait, what, oh no why??"
It even describes it as "powerfully seductive" which is not how I felt at all about the description. It's above my paygrade to judge another culture. But I felt sorry for the poor bear.
No it's not. Being attracted or repulsed by other people's behavior is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human.
Of course, if you are doing or studying anthropology, you should be as objective as possible. But in the course of just being a person, it's good to be critical, because basically everyone is doing almost everything wrong, and it's good to point that out when you see it.
It's one of the fundamental aspects of being a toddler. Then your parents teach you to stop gagging when eating foods you find repulsive and you realize there were other qualities to that food that you can appreciate. Then your parents make you do your homework despite you putting up a resistance and you at some point realize how beneficial that homework was. Then you somehow end up in college where hopefully, in the American system at least, they teach you about other cultures and how silly it is to judge other cultures for things you've only taken a cursory glance at.
That is, any group can arbitrarily make up rules and belief systems that point in any arbitrary direction. Just because you happen to be apart of a larger group, doesn't mean yours are any better than anyone elses.
A simple example can be summed up with the mutilation of genitals. At a first glance an uneducated person would probably say "no, that's completely wrong, I don't care what anyone says, there is something fundamentally crazy about mutilating your genitals." An educated person would have at least taken 10 minutes to hear out that, some people are born believing their sex is incorrect and to help them live a better life they sometimes modify their genitals to match the sex they believe themselves to be.
Is your post satirical? It is easy to over apply abstract ideals if you let yourself. One person's objection to the mistreatment of animals isn't a toddler refusing broccoli, it's a reflection of cultural value. If you weren't blinded by cognitive dissonance you'd at least recognize that feeling of disgust is no better or worse than the mistreatment (or acceptable cultural ritual) of the bear and would abstain from judging the parent posters. Fortunately the kind of apathetic moral relativism you're espousing rings hollow for most.
Star Trek doesn't have paygrades because Star Trek doesn't have money. Try the U.S. military, the stereotype of the corrupt commissioned officer saying things like "Askin' questions like that is above your paygrade, son."
I never heard it from that perspective - only from below, as in "I'm not paid to worry about such things". (And/or implied not qualified, which is how I read my OP-ish.)
This got me into a rabbit hole on Wikipedia about where all the peoples of Japan came from, and what makes the Ainu indigenous. If an indigenous people is the first to settle, not sure the Ainu are clear winners. Lots of dispute about early population dynamics of Japan.
It seems the Ainu are considered indigenous because some have maintained their culture instead of assimilating into the larger group, which is unlike the Jomon and Yayoi people who many believe are the ancestors of modern Japanese people.
Surely the Yamato people are indigenous to southern Honshu. And surely the Ainu are indigenous to Hokkaido. Certainly the Ainu are not not indigenous to Japan.
"Indigenous" is frequently used in a context where a people's rights to their ancestral lands are threatened. It is an assertion of their claim to places where they are threatened. In the case of the Ainu, much of Japanese colonization and colonialism was justified with the ideology that the Ainu were "dying race" or "disappearing". This was acompanied by the usual policies of social oppression and linguicide—taking them away from their parents to Japanese-only schools and beating or shaming them if they dared to speak the language of their parents.
> Surely the Yamato people are indigenous to southern Honshu
Sort of. It's worth clarifying that "indigenous peoples" is a specific legalistic term which connotes more (less?) than just "indigenous". In that context the "Yamato people" as the dominant cultural group in Japan typically do not qualify as an "indigenous people". Confusing matters further, "indigenous" itself is often used in the same, more restrictive context.
As I understand the Ainu and the literature regarding them, they are considered an indigenous population rather than the indigenous population, not just to northern Honshu, but Hokkaido and also Choka/Sakhalin/Karafuto.
Japan consists of islands, everybody there came from somewhere else.
This is true in Australia and the US as well, the Aboriginals and Native Americans just came several thousand years before the next waves of settlement.
I learned growing up in Japan in the 90's that the Ainu are indigenous people of Hokkaido, the northernmost island in Japan. Okinawa and Hokkaido weren't really Japanese until recently. I think I remember learning that Hokkaido was like Australia, where the mainland sent Japanese prisoners/criminals to or something.
The north coast of Hokkaido is home to the Abashiri Prison. The original building was built in the late 1800s by the prisoners, in pretty harsh conditions. We were told being sent there was like being banished to Siberia. It was used for Yakuza and political prisoners.
We were recently in Northern Hokkaido, but didn't have enough time in Abashiri to visit the prison museum. That part of the island is nothing like the rest of Japan.
Anyone else first hear about the Ainu through arcade games? I didn't remember which one, but a Google search brings up Samurai Shodown, which looks familiar. The character was Nakoruru.
I certainly did. I didn't know that the official Japanese Government didn't fully recognize the Ainu until 2000s.
Samurai Showdown was straight up a 90s arcade game, which arguably means that Nakoruru's placement as a Ainu character would have been before the official recognition of those people.
Nakoruru's moveset revolved around her Bird (either a falcon or an eagle... I forgot exactly), as well as her own dagger style. So it seems like the Ainu are very similar to the Native American tropes (Natural and close to the earth).
Animal cruelly plain and simple. This isn't simple killing but torture, the deliberate infliction of unnecessary pain, on an animal. Such rituals are to be studied by academics but not celebrated.
What really gets me is the obvious role this ritual plays. It is a baby-killing game. It is meant to harden people against the slaughter of a being raised as a member of the family. It was raised as more than a pet. Women nursed this animal. Then they tortured it to death. How did those women feel? Watching such things, accepting them as normal, makes killing of friends and family that much easier. This is torture being used to enable more torture and is far from unique. Shall we also celebrate how our ancestors trained themselves to be cruel? Should the British Navy celebrating the grand traditions of whipping sailors?
> I thought the article really went out of its way to romanticize the captivity and torture of a non-domesticated wild animal.
This is how I feel about dog ownership. We take children from their species, sterilize them, and gaslight them into thinking they're part of our family instead. The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them. If anything, raising, hunting, and killing an animal is more natural than what we do.
I'd highly recommend reading a book like "The Domestic Dog," which was recently updated with a new edition in 2017. It contains all of the latest science and anthropology around the origins of the human/dog relationship.
The tl;dr is that dogs really do identify us as family, and in all likelihood, the first ancestral wolves to become domesticated dogs took as many co-evolutionary steps towards us as we did them.
Humans and dogs have been evolving alongside each other for at least 15,000 years. The sorts of dog breeds that can't survive in the wild (bulldogs, etc.) are a fairly recent innovation in all of that time, dating back to the mid 1800s and the emergence of the modern breeding program.
Dogs like being with us as much as we like having them around. They were the first domesticated species, and they are literally the only mammals we know of who can read human facial expressions and emotions as well as the great apes can. Our relationship with them is a partnership, not an enslavement.
If you want to take issue with the way humans treat animals, there are so many better targets for outrage than our treatment of the dog. Take the cow or the chicken, for instance, most of whom lead a tortured and awful existence and would want nothing to do with us in a state of nature.
The reason I chose dogs is because it isn't an easy target.
Another example is Deer. I live in New Jersey and we have an overpopulation of Deer, to which the most common response is that we should cull them so they don't become dangerous to roads. The moral stance would be to design our transportation in a way that doesn't frequently kill other species. Another common response is that the overpopulation will lead to them dying anyway as their isn't enough food to sustain them, so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.
The Ainu people believe that their treatment of bears is just. I'm just pointing out that I'd rather see all of these animals free from human emotional projection.
The issue with deer is that there are too few natural predators for them in many places on the east coast. The booming population has detrimental effects on the forests. Deer consume only certain plants so they end up causing lower diversity of eastern forests. When the decision is either cull them now or let the population starve until it gets back to a comfortable capacity, it's much better to cull them. This not only helps the surrounding ecosystem but also gives some people the chance to get large quantities of meat for almost no cost. Some people in the US really do still live off the land to an extent, meat is much cheaper when you kill and clean the animal yourself.
We kill them, because we have replaced the apex predator in most ecosystems.
There are too few wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, and bears to keep the population in check, so we do it.
>so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.
There's more to it than that. Overpopulation will cause damage to more than just deer. One of the biggest is the increase in the deer tick population and the subsequent increase in Lyme disease.
Instead of killing them ourselves, we could try to reintroduce predators, but why would a deer prefer being killed by a mountain lion to being killed by a human?
Coyotes never really went anywhere; in fact, they seem to thrive in the same marginal suburban and semi-wild niches that deer do. Coyotes don't generally prey on deer, however, and hence they're not a perfect substitute for the lost wolves and bears. (Coyotes are too small and slow to take adult deer, except in snowy conditions.)
We have reintroduced wolves to national parks like Yellowstone, evidently with great success. I hope we do the same in other national parks if/where needed. Wolves do not prey on humans, contrary to popular belief, and generally keep a lot of distance from wandering hikers or campers.
Nature may not be "fair," but all things considered, I'd rather we let the wolves do the job of deer population control than humans. We are not as good at it, and we also pump the ecosystem full of heavy metals while we're shooting at the critters.
There are many problems with dog breeding though. The health and wellbeing of the animals do not seem to be prime motivations in at least some breeds.
But at least it contrasts with cows and chickens, which are domesticated and selectively bred as meat producing machines that survive just long enough for slaughter (for 99.99% of individuals of those species).
While we humans are thinking creatures, and must seek to act morally, keep in mind that nature isn't and doesn't.
From the perspective of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, humans create a huge number of niches which dozens (hundreds?) of species have evolved to fill. (And to be fair, eliminated a vast number of niches as well.) We've created niches like "human head and body hair", which lice exploit, "provide emotional support for humans", which dogs and cats fill, "carry heavy shit for humans", which horses, donkeys and oxen have filled (and still do, in some places), and "produce huge numbers of delicious offspring, most of whom humans will eat", which pigs and chickens and cows fill.
From nature's perspective, these niches are no more strange or unnatural than the bacteria which live in guts to break down plant matter for their hosts, the birds that pick insects off of large animals, coral reefs or the ants that farm aphids. Even meat animals aren't really a significant aberration: countless species produce huge amounts of young, from dozens to millions at a time, with only one or two of those offspring surviving to reproduce themselves ("r selection").
Nature is all about the survival of the genes most fit for the existing niches. It doesn't care about what niches existed in the past or might exist in the future, and it doesn't share your biases. As far as nature is concerned, cows and dogs are more fit than buffalo and wolves, because cows and dogs are better-adapted to the existing niches.
You can choose to believe otherwise, that wolves are inherently superior to dogs and buffalo to cows, but that's your judgement, not nature's.
Well put, and I agree. I love the theory of evolution for explaining so much of the living world, including the awful stuff. I think it's a great comfort to know that it's not arbitrary.
In fact it can explain why I have empathy with other living things, and want them to have happy lives. Maybe that will be an expanding niche, who knows. I know nature doesn't care, but I do.
You/we ARE a part of nature. If 100% of people care about doing certain things (that they actually have control over) in a certain way, that's the same as nature doing it that way. When it's a smaller percentage, that's just that thing happening in different ways.
Well, that's true in the same sense that everything in the world is just quantum fields interacting. It's true that my mind is part of nature, but my thoughts are not part of an explanatory theory, a framework for predictions, certainly not one that is mostly about genetics and evolution.
Explanatory theories, frameworks and the like are always a work in progress, ergo, never complete - ref Gödel's theorems. What's standard knowledge in the future can easily be utterly incomprehensible today, thus that (being part of a theory or framework) shouldn't be taken as a necessary criteria in talking about things at a level that's more abstract than a theory (which by definition must be about the (mathematical) specifics of specific phenomena), as the parent thread does.
If, as you rightly claim, everything is just interacting fields, should it make or break the argument if the specific interaction of particular (as yet unknown) combinations of fields is as yet unknown?
It can also be questioned if an individual's thoughts are special enough in the grandest scheme of things - or if they're merely a mechanism, that seems special to the body where those thoughts are occurring. For example, moving away from humans: animals have thoughts too, yet their behavior(s) can be abstracted into proper theories (apex predator theory, food chains, etc.) backed with sufficient evidence, without much regard to the thoughts of individual creatures, or even entire species - classifying creatures as predator vs prey is sufficient to study a lot of large scale ecological phenomena.
Of course, there can be various kinds of explanations for why one feels empathy for others - evolution: humans evolved to live in groups and empathy was an asset to group-living, incentives/economic: those that show consideration for others were similarly reciprocated, etc. etc.
PS: I wrote the parent, different alias.
PPS: the dog breeding problems are very real, and I do hope a rich dog-loving American can hire veterinarians and lawyers to simply sue some of the organizations involved in setting/promoting the ludicrous breed standards (resulting in GSDs with sloping backs, pugs that can't even breed without human assistance, etc.). The difference with cows and chickens is one can find enough dog lovers to make an actual issue out of this, compared to (live) cow lovers or (live) chicken lovers.
There was a genetic survey done a bit ago that suggests that wolves and dogs are more remotely related. That domestic dogs existed as a separate wild dog species from wolves at the time of domestication.
Does that book talk about the phenomenon of baboons stealing puppies from wild dogs and raising them?
Every time we look at it we end up pushing back the date of human canine cohabitation. If it turns out that this coevolution with dogs predates hominids, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
Yes, hence why I use the term "ancestral wolves" and not simply "wolves," in the hopes of avoiding confusion. Many people assume dogs are simply some sort of captured/degenerated/infantilized versions of the modern-day grey wolf. This is not at all the case. The likely ancestor of the domestic dog was an ancient lineage of Middle Eastern/Eurasian wolf that is presently extinct and did not survive the last glacial maximum -- because humans hunted its megafaunal prey to extinction. Dogs used to be classified by most textbooks as subspecies of Canis lupus, the grey wolf. Increasingly, genetic analysis shows that Canis familiaris might properly be its own species.
The dog was, in all likelihood, domesticated multiple times over multiple thousands of years in various parts of the globe. The lineage that survived to present is likely to have come from the Fertile Crescent area, even though its domestication predates the agricultural revolution. (Dogs joined us when we were hunter-gatherers, and cats joined us when we settled down to store grain and thereby attracted rodents).
I am not convinced that non-human apes "domesticated" the dog the same way we did, even if modern apes seem capable of taking actions superficially analogous to domestication. Ancestral wolves specifically followed human camps around and lived among us for (presumably) thousands of years before it even occurred to us to domesticate them as such. By that time, nature had 'pre-selected' them for us -- the friendly and cooperative ones, who could survive at the margins of our hunting parties, outcompeted their more feral cousins, who kept their distance from humans and then starved when the mammoths ran out. The first ancient wolves we came into frequent, nonviolent contact with were, in all likelihood, the result of many generations of natural selection before we set about artificially selecting them.
Ironically, and counterntuitively, dogs were more naturally fit than wolves to survive in the early days of the Homo sapiens.
> The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them.
Dogs can't live in nature? I think that needs a citation. Or at least we need some kind of explanation for the apparently impossible phenomenon of stray and feral dogs.
They're probably referring to particular breeds that are known for chronic health issues.
Dogs with extremely flat faces (think pugs)? They have a lot of trouble breathing. Also, their eye sockets are shallow and so their eyes will pop out of the socket sometimes. There's a litany of health issues related to chasing the breed standard for dogs, sometimes related to how the standard has been taken to an extreme that deform the dog and sometimes related to the massive inbreeding that's happened as a result of chasing the breed standard.
There are certainly some dogs that can live in the wild, and there are certainly some breeders who try hard to be responsible about how they breed for the standard and how they breed their lines together, but the average purebred dog is not one you can just drop in the woods and it'll go find its own food and survive.
Nah, that at least is a fair point. Stray dogs mostly scavenge. They aren't actively hunting for the most part. My cat meanwhile used to catch at least 30% of her diet, something I know because she liked to disembowel small woodland creatures in the bathtub, where they couldn't escape.
My chihuahua was rescued on the streets of San Francisco after an unknown period of time fending for himself. He was a little underweight but not dramatically so. No signs of previous ownership (no chip, no collar, not neutered) so he was possibly just dumped somewhere at a young age (they estimated he was 1-1.5 yrs when found).
He fiercely guards food and will snap at anyone that reaches for him. He hunts insects including flies and cockroaches (he caught at least a few of those on our walks).
I don’t think he’d be as effective as a rat terrier, but I suspect he could hunt and kill field mice and maybe small rats.
Chihuahuas are one of the most common breeds found in Bay Area animal shelters (along with pit bulls). Lots of unethical backyard breeders around here who dump surplus puppies.
German shepherds are interstingly often very inbred. From talking to my girlfriend (this is her field), it sounds like it's unlikely that any purebred dogs would be able to adapt well to an actual wilderness
I have a pack of dogs. And they all hunt opportunistically. There're plenty of (mostly eaten) prey corpses strewn over the acreage. Anecdotal I know but I'm sure you can read up on prey drive in numerous dog breeds.
I recognize that not everybody does this, but as somebody who owns a pet (my wife and I both have cats), I take the responsibility of ownership very seriously. My cat doesn't have a lot of agency in her own life, so I try to get healthy food that she appears to enjoy, I play with her and try to provide the stimulation she wants, and I try to provide an environment that keeps her happy even if she isn't able to leave it. If she's not feeling well, I take her to the vet and get the care she needs as opposed to the care that is cheap. And at some point, she'll get sick and I'll have to make the choice about her quality of life being low enough that it's better for her to pass.
There are ways to be responsible about pet ownership for animals like dogs and cats. It doesn't need to be this horrific experience you've painted it as.
It seems unnecessarily complicated to suggest that dogs are interested in anything more than food/water, shelter, comfort, and basic relationships with something that can interact (whether it's a human, dog, or otherwise).
Well that's a very strange interpretation. Other than the sterilization (which prevents extreme suffering of future dogs that wouldn't have homes), dogs for the most part seem to love every part of being part of human life.
This bear stuff would be just fine too if they didn't torture it to death at the end.
> The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them.
This is false. The accepted mechanism is that wolves self-domesticated, and that humans and dogs co-evolved.
This is standard ideological racewar stuff, which as you know (or should, because we told you) is off topic for HN.
People can't endlessly litigate this on Hacker News. It's beyond tedious—as is anything that gets repeated over and over—and there's no intellectual curiosity in it (despite how it looks on the surface—and some practitioners have gotten good at making it look otherwise), only tribalism. It hijacks discussion, clogs the drain, and destroys what HN is best for: specific and unpredictable topics, like an ancient Japanese people most of us had never heard of.
Since you've repeatedly violated both the spirit and rules of the site, as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and our many moderation warnings to you, I've banned this account.
No, it's not. The comment is stating that I, along with all the other Irish-Americans, should not be in the United States. That's prima facie disrespectful. It's even more disrespectful to African-Americans, of course. The fact that the comment only logically implies that instead of stating it explicitly doesn't make it any better, it just makes it obscurantist.
Nah, I literally just heard someone make this same argument yesterday on another site while trying to argue that "white genocide" was occuring in America. They even referenced Japan, smh.
Heterogeneity is the cost of colonization. If you spend hundreds of years using people as cheap labor or stealing resources from their communities you are going to have an influx of those same people integrating into a culture they are now familiar with.
pcwalton is right—this is boilerplate ideological battle. That's a violation of both HN's rules and its spirit. This is not a site for race war, however "respectful" its "manner". More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15451825, and in countless other comments sctb and I have posted.
1000x this. HN is a place to talk about technology and related topics. If there does need to be some political ideology on display, only left leaning viewpoints are acceptable.
Japan's homogeneity is also part of a massive racial/cultural superiority complex which fed their imperialistic ambitions and propelled them into ww2.
If the international order hadn't chosen to try and avoid the mistakes of ww1, Japan could be the equivalent of east Germany today. Or worse, since I imagine the iron curtain is easier to enforce on an island.
As it is, they're having issues with youth marriage and a population pyramid imbalance that's seriously threatening their stability. These are not unrelated to their unwillingness to progress.
I don't know how much I'd be willing to hold up Japan's homogeneity as an example of a successful hidebound and insular culture.
> Japan's homogeneity is also part of a massive racial/cultural superiority complex which fed their imperialistic ambitions and propelled them into ww2.
WWII marked the 50th anniversary of the Japanese occupation of Korea and Manchuria. They have a peaceful island but a bloody history.
> I'd much rather live in Japan as a Japanese person or in Switzerland as a "Swiss" than in a country where my demographic is being overrun by another.
If you have this attitude you won't like Japan very much then. Not only has Japan spent the last 25 years coming to terms with a more open society and economy, but they're recognizing now that if they don't make citizenship more accessible for immigration and accept they are not a "nation of one race" (as many in power have previously pandered) they're teetering towards a national collapse.
> I truly hope Japan keeps its doors shut to foreigners seeking to move there. Today, you can walk down any of the streets of Tokyo without batting an eyelash. Try doing the same in Chicago.
Unless you are, you know, a woman. Or homeless.
Your opinion of Japan seems somewhat romanticized and influenced by media that over-simplifies it. That itself is pretty disrespectful to a country that's struggling to define and redefine itself in a modern world.
Maybe try studying what Japan is, instead of suggesting the legacy of imperialist nationalism should he cherished.
> Do you hate Trump? Well, the only reason he's in power is because someone from a different culture than yours voted him in.
I don't really get how this is relevant. I do wish he'd stop saying it's okay to fire me because of my experience of gender though.
Oh wait, was your point that Trump being from "another culture" and someone with many accusations of sexual assault (some under oath and not contested) is an example of how multi-culturalism is responsible for rape?
In my observations (and some bias; I am openly admitting it) which were sometimes reinforced by meeting real Japanese people, most Japanese are xenophobes, racists and very easily collectively agree not to speak about stuff they dislike / feel threatens some imaginary dominance / endanger their prejudices.
For all the glorification the country and its people get around the globe, and for all the romantic blemish their fatalistic and stoic philosophy receives, the Japanese I've encountered and observed remotely are pretty ordinary people with a lot of prejudice and hostility towards foreigners attached.
Not impressed. And this news comes as no surprise as well.
Guess people just love to glorify stuff that's very different from their own, with zero thought if that's actually a good thing?
You're not wrong. I believe the effect comes from living in a racially and culturally homogeneous society.
I lived in Japan for several years on and off. Near the end of one of my longest stretches, I clearly remember walking by the glass window of a storefront in Osaka. I saw someone in the reflection that had an absolutely startling appearance, and gasped aloud. Taller, with different hair, eyes, and skin than anyone I'd seen in months. It was me.
The experience of returning to the USA was particularly jarring that time, too. I remember feeling surprised at how fat everyone in the airport was, how there were people with different skin colors everywhere, how loud and lacking in politeness social interactions were. I was born and raised in the USA but there I was, experiencing fight or flight response in completely ordinary situations.
I learned to forgive the Japanese after these experiences.
On point, thank you. And pretty good evidence of neural network [re-]training, too.
You know, I couldn't give two shits about xenophobic and racist people like them, really. Let them do that and be happy.
As we say in my country however: "be stupid but get the fuck off the road".
Bad influences on young people from old and prejudiced (and bitter?) people is never good. We need a world with more open-minded people and societies like the Japanese aren't helping matters at all. But to be as objective as possible -- not sure our societies help matters either.
> xenophobes, racists and very easily collectively agree not to speak about stuff they dislike / feel threatens some imaginary dominance / endanger their prejudices
You've just described most groups of people, particularly in the older age brackets. People are afraid of what they don't understand and generally dislike change and unpredictability.
That's not to say that xenophobes/prejudiced people can't produce anything interesting or worthy of admiration. Isolation in many ways has led to interesting solutions to problems, and the preservation of culture can have benefits just as it has disadvantages.
1) Fascinating story. I had no idea the Ainu existed. Their way of life seems very reminiscent of the Haida and other indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest.
2) I thought the author's description of the iyomante was precious and patronizing. TLDR: according to the article, the iyomante is the ritualized slaughter of an adult bear that has been taken from its mother as an infant and raised in confined captivity. It's not a quick death, according to the article:
> At the start of the ceremony, an elder offered a prayer first to the goddess of the fire and hearth, Fuchi. The elder led the men to the bear cage. They prayed. They released the bear to exercise and play, then shot him with two blunt arrows before strangling and beheading him, freeing the spirit. People feasted, they danced, they sang. They decorated the head and an old woman recited sagas of Ainu Mosir, the floating world that rested on the back of a fish.
I get that knowing how this ceremony was carried out is extremely important anthropologically, and there's something to admire in the extent to which the Ainu were connected to the ecosystem in which they lived. That said, I thought the article really went out of its way to romanticize the captivity and torture of a non-domesticated wild animal.