In the preceding section [of my book], I mentioned the knowledge of Ainu elders as one source for historical evidence of daily life in earlier times. This knowledge, handed down through the generations, is not limited to cosmic views and values; it also includes skills related to human life, such as birthing and healing, which are naturally vital concerns for any people.

The story I will tell of the birth of a child and the introduction of the skill of midwifery in Ainu society, for example, is based on knowledge imparted to Aoki Aiko [by her ancestors and on her personal experiences. Aiko was the fifth successor to the skills of an ikoinkar (midwife) passed down through her maternal an-castors. Not only did she inherit practical skills in the narrow sense, but she received in the palm of her left hand, through a ritual process, a special ability called tekeinu (to feel in the hand). She was also an inheritor of the ability of tusu (divination) that belongs more broadly to shamanism, becoming one of the rare few in the late twentieth century to possess this ability.

After encountering Nagai Hiroshi, a naturalist in Sapporo city, and his wife, Etsuko, Aiko began narrating the skills and oral traditions passed down from her ancestors, following her retirement from work as ikoinkar in 1975. As an undergraduate, Nagai (then Ueda) Etsuko had visited Hokkaid? while preparing her thesis on Ainu food culture. After graduation, she assisted Kayano Shigeru in compiling the book Ainu no mingu (Aims folk utensils). One summer day, she fell while climbing Poroshiri Peak in Hidaka and hurt her hip so badly she could hardly move. She visited Aiko, who was skilled in Ainu medicine generally.

Aiko perceived "something" in Etsuko's personality, perhaps because of her ability of tusu or ueinkar (clairvoyance, extrasensory perception). For her part, Etsuko was surprised to see before her own eyes something that had been lost from today's world. During their first conversation, Aiko discussed, as a known fact, an event in Etsuko's past that Etsuko had not mentioned. Five years later, in 1978, in response to Aiko's wishes, Etsuko began recording what we may call the "contemporary oral tradition." The delay, which might have been an inconvenience, was instead highly fortunate: Etsuko had in the meantime married Nagai Hiroshi, an experienced documentary photographer and filmmaker. The story below of Aoki Aiko the ikoinkar, as well as the picture of midwifery given in part 2, draws primarily on what the Nagais learned from Aiko-huchi [also romanized as fuchi and meaning respected woman elder], supplemented by information gathered in my own meetings with her.

Seen in Nibutani as a somewhat "unusual" person, Aiko did not fail a single time in the nearly six hundred deliveries she handled; moreover, she once discovered a pregnancy at an early stage after it had been misdiagnosed at two different maternity hospitals as a tumor or a lump of flesh. "Heaven forbid, this is a perfect ainu!" she said. Later, she safely delivered the baby. In her own area she was renowned as a skilled midwife.

I mentioned that Aoki Aiko was the fifth-generation successor to the family art of ikoinkar and tusu. The only known birth date of her predecessors is that of the fourth generation, her mother, Ukochatek, the date of death of the third generation, her grandmother Haenure, is known, but not the date of her birth. Aiko knows about the first and second generations only through her mother and grandmother. While the Ainu had a sophisticated vigesimal numerical system, it was considered improper to count or ask another's age.

The estimated life spans of those in the first and second generations and the periods of their activities as midwives are indicated above. While the midwife of the first generation rarely worked as tusu, she is said to have had powerful clairvoyance, able to see in her mind's eye what someone was doing—for example, on a distant mountain. With this ability, Aiko imagined, the art of tusu, which seems to have become more intense from the third generation on, was probably unnecessary.

At the time of the first generation, life seems to have been comfortable enough. It became harder with the second generation, and beginning with the third generation the family experienced great poverty. This undoubtedly reflected the impoverishment of the hamlet as a whole, owing to Japanese exploitation and the forced labor draft that began in the late Edo period. No matter how skilled a midwife was, the hamlet and neighboring hamlets no longer had the resources to guarantee her living. Aiko's grandmother continued to devote much time to the art of delivery and tusu, but few households were able to make voluntary contributions, as they had done before. The fifth generation saw the time when an academic background and reading and writing knowledge of Japanese were required, and those with real strength in skills and theory of childbirth were branded as "unqualified, illegal midwives" unless they passed the new official standards.

As a child, Aiko had a strong tendency, to the extent that it bothered her mother, toward minute observation (called in Ainu ichimchimi, meaning "sorting out with hands"). This was an indication of her lively curiosity and inquisitiveness. When Aiko was twelve [around 1926], her mother began bringing her along as an assistant whenever there was a delivery. The following is an account of one of the visits Aiko remembers from those early days.

This particular birth took place in a poor Shisam family who lived in a charcoal burner's but deep in the mountains. There was no blanket. The pregnant woman lay on the floor under one layer of kimono. Hot water, to be used for bathing the newborn, was boiling in an iron pot over the firepit. The upper end of the hook for hanging the pot was tied to the beam with grapevine skin, called sutukap in Ainu. "So it's not just Ainu people; Shisam also use sutukap," Aiko thought.

When the baby was born with an energetic birth cry, a family member hurriedly poured the hot water from the pot into a washbowl and mixed it with cold water. Aiko's hapo first washed the baby's face, then its body. The family had no washcloth. Since absorbent cotton was unavailable in that area in those days, Hapo used sagebrush cotton she had brought. Good for stopping blood and killing germs, it was also used for treating the woman after she gave birth.

When all was finished, the payment from the poor family was a cup of tea. The washbowl used for cleaning the baby was once again placed over the fire to boil water, then that water was poured into a tin can used as a teapot. Instead of tea leaves, cranes-bill leaves were used. "It's not just Ainu people who use cranes-bill," Aiko thought. On their way home, she said to Hapo, "They didn't pay you a penny and served tea from water in the washbowl for the baby. From now on, don't drink such unclean things."

Hapo answered sternly, "If I leave the delivery house without even drinking tea, I cause yainikoroshima (embarrassment) to ' Uwarikamui (the deity of childbirth). The birth of a new life isn't a matter of bills or coins. I do it with my true love, with my heart, so I won't embarrass Uwarikamui. That's why I've been able to handle the toughest births safely."

At twelve, around the time Aiko began accompanying Hapo as an ikoinkar assistant, she was instructed in "the posture of giving birth by oneself" by Hapo and Huchi, who was then still in good health. Aiko does not remember if there was a special term for this way of sitting, but Huchi demonstrated kemaha pirkano monoa (the way of sitting with proper leg posture), then had her granddaughter try it:

In this region, bending forward or prostrating oneself was considered a Shisam-style posture. According to the method Aiko inherited, an Ainu midwife always makes the woman in child-birth lie on her back, for otherwise the accomplished midwife cannot use her delivery skills.

Aiko first acted as a midwife by herself when she was nineteen [in 1933]. The woman was sixteen years old by Western count, and this was her first childbirth. She was somewhat petite, and her womb was "just one step away from being sufficiently developed." By then Hapo had given Aiko serious training in midwifery. For example, by letting Alko feel the abdomen of pregnant women who came for examinations, Hapo taught her how to tell the sex of the fetus or discover an abnormality. Should two childbirths concur, Hapo believed Aiko was at a stage where she could replace her mother for one, as long as it was a normal delivery. However, Hapo had never directly shown her the apa (aperture) of the baby's passage. Hapo had always let Aiko observe her from the rear as she worked with the baby, and then explained the birth in detail on the way home.

That day, news of labor pains arrived almost simultaneously from Koupira, two and a half miles downstream from Nibutani, and Penakori, two and a half miles upstream. The dialogue that took place between the two went like this (in Ainu):

In the saranip (woven bag with one strap) that Hapo handed to Aiko were four items: scissors for cutting the umbilical cord, thread made of the inner skin of bittersweet for tying the umbilical cord off at the navel, sagebrush cotton, and inner skin of wild hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata; rasupa in Ainu and nori-utsugi in Japanese), for use in place of soap and as an accelerant in a difficult labor.

Hapo did not let Aiko take a washbowl, saying there would be one in the woman's house. Though now resigned to the situation, Aiko kept thinking, "What if I embarrass Uwarikamui, what if I'm scolded by Uwarikamui?" All that occupied her mind and heart as she started out was the deity Uwarikamui.

At the house of the woman in labor, people naturally expected the famed midwife Ukochatek, Aiko's mother, to come. They must have felt uneasy when a nineteen-year-old maiden appeared by herself. But Aiko was even more uneasy. Her heart throbbing, she took her seat on the left side of the woman just as she had seen Hapo do.

As instructed by Hapo, Aiko offered this prayer in Ainu to Uwarikamui: "O, Uwarikamui, I will never set out to do this task halfheartedly. I have brought here in my bosom the ancestral skills and my personal deity. If, together with my deity, you protect me, it will go well. The deity of fire is here with me, too. I would like to be Hapo's good successor, so please help me."

As she manually examined the abdomen of the mother-to-be, her heart-throbbing anxiety gradually disappeared, and she grew so calm that it was strange even to herself. "If you are ready to pray with all your heart, you can deliver the child successfully," Hapo had said. "Try to catch the `heart' of the baby being born." This advice expressed a belief handed down through generations of ancestors. Since the baby was in normal position, the woman had an easy birth and the delivery did not require a large variety of skills.

At the last stage of a normal delivery like this, Aiko would use her hands carefully. At the moment the baby's head shows, the midwife lightly places the thumb of each hand on it, while avoiding the fontanel. Next, as the baby's cheeks come out from the passage, she places her forefingers on each side of the chin, where the nerves are concentrated. At the same time, she slides her fingers just slightly forward. In response, the baby pulls its chin in. This technique can also be effectively applied when, in a breech delivery, the baby's chin is stuck: doing the same thing with fingers partly inserted into the passage makes the delivery easier. By using this method, Aiko said, the baby "comes out with delight." When this is done to a newborn, it laughs. [Translator's note: This recalls what we know as an inborn reflex-passing a finger across the chin just below the underlip causes a baby to break into a big smile.]

When the head is out and it is time for the neck, the midwife feels it with the forefinger of the hand that is to catch the baby. As she touches the neckbone, she lets her finger glide forward to the base of the neck. When the chest is coming out, she palpates with the same hand the thoracic vertebrae (the most important being the third vertebra and its vicinity), from the neck down toward the hips. Her hand stops at the lumbar vertebrae, and at that point it catches the baby—in other words, the baby is now "delivered" onto her hand.

Before the delivery, the midwife stretches her left leg so as to support, with the toes, the woman's anus from underneath. When the baby's head shows, she moves her toes to the woman's coccyx to push it upward. This makes it easier for the pelvis to open. The baby, caught at the lumbar vertebrae by the method described above, will then land on the shin of the midwife's outstretched left leg. Occasionally the right leg is used as needed.

The function of each hand or finger is not set in advance of the entire process. The midwife chooses the fingers that are the most natural and easiest to use at a given moment. The act of feeling with a finger for each section of the backbone is called "receiving." In Aiko's words, "Giving stimulation to each part awakens the baby's nerves." Doing so helps keep the bone structure from moving out of place so that the delivery becomes smooth, ultimately making the process easier for the baby, the woman, and therefore the midwife.

Of further importance is that this technique enables quick discovery of any disorder of the bone structure or abnormality in the internal organs. Many mental and nervous illnesses that occur by early adulthood are considered to be caused, albeit remotely, by problems occurring around the backbone at the time of delivery. If Aiko detected abnormality, she treated it immediately after cutting the umbilical cord (she was also skilled in spinal column correction, an art of Ainu medicine). She considered incompetent midwives and obstetricians responsible for a fair number of cases of infantile physical crippling, partial hernias of the groin, and dislocations of the hip joint.

Before bathing the newborn, Aiko gave thanks to the deities for the successful delivery, then, in an act of sharing with the baby this irreplaceable joy, put her cheek to the little body covered with mucus and blood. With her mouth she sucked the mucus out of the baby's mouth. She then chewed on butterbur root and fed the juice mouth-to-mouth in order to prompt the child's first discharges.

It was in October 1945, when Hapo was on her deathbed with cancer, that Aiko, then thirty-one years old, was initiated into the special ability of feeling in the hand. Aiko, who was married, lived nearby and frequently went home to look after Hapo. One day, she saw Hapo's left palm rise with undulating motions. Hapo said to Aiko in a formal tone, "It isn't right not to pass down the ancestral deities. Quickly, go call Sekko-achapo."

Sekko-achapo (Uncle Sekko, whose Japanese name was Kaizawa Seitar?) was a relative and one of the few ekashi [respected male elder] who could properly perform traditional rituals in Ainu. In Nibutani Kotan, only three or so such ekashi then remained. Mediation between humans and deities required a ritual performed by such a man. When Sekko-achapo arrived, Hapo talked to him in Ainu while showing him her undulating palm: "I am now so weakened that I only await my death. Whether with Ainu or Shisam, I have tried my best as a midwife. I believe it is thanks to my guardian deities that an error has never occurred. Please give prayers so that after my death the good ancestral guardians move to my only daughter."

Sekko-achapo, known as a fluent orator, immediately left her bedside to sit by the firepit and begin praying to the fire deity. When Hapo said, "Take my hand in yours," Aiko covered it with her left palm. She felt the rising palpitation under her palm. It felt both strange and ticklish. While their palms were joined together, Hapo gravely delivered her dying will in Ainu:

By the time Hapo's speech was over, the palpitation in her left hand was gone. "Hioioi, tane isam wa (Good, there's nothing more to say)," Hapo said. Sekko-achapo stopped his kamuinomi (prayer) and stepped back from the fireside to join the two women.

Hapo died in March of the next year, on a day when long icicles hung from the eaves. Her heart and breathing had stopped, and neighbors who had gathered were busily preparing for the wake. Two hours or so after her death, however, Hapo spoke out, "Echi=nu (Can you folks hear me)?" Those present were so taken aback that one dropped something, and another, who was removing the door, fell under it. Hapo said, "Don't be angry with me. An ekashi on a carriage drawn by a white horse came for me, but I remembered that I left the wine I'd prepared as a gift to take to heaven. So I've come back for it. There were three gallons. They're not here, though, are they?" Her firstborn son had lent the three gallons of wine to a neighbor. When Aiko said, "Okay, Hapo. I'll make sure that you take the wine with you," Hapo closed her eyes saying, "Sorry to surprise you. So, this is good-bye for real."

So went Aiko's story about how her mother departed to kamui moshir (the land of the gods).

Aiko's midwifery had evolved through a dozen years of experience before she partook in the tekeinu succession ritual. Hapo's technical instruction seems to have been concluded by then. Hapo's younger sister had handled a larger number of deliveries than Hapo, with skills not inferior to Hapo's. But Hapo alone had received the tekeinu initiation from Huchi.

A tusu inspiration suddenly occurred to Aiko about two months after Hapo's death, one day in May of 1946. Aiko's husband, who had contracted malaria while in military service, had been discharged following Japan's defeat in World War II. That day the couple was out in the field, planting corn. Her husband, running a high fever, began uttering nonsensical words, and, at that moment, Aiko became hazy. Though she remembers somehow reaching home, after that she lost consciousness. "I became ruhai (dazed)," as she put it. While she was unconscious, Aiko continuously and rapidly spoke in Ainu, her body quivering. The vibrations did not stop even after she was carried inside the house. Since no one around her fully understood her Ainu, Nitani Ku-nimatsu-ekashi was sent for.

The words Aiko repeated formed a message spoken by an ancestor through Aiko's voice, "This one will die if you leave her alone. Hurry and make a kinasut-kamui (snake deity) and let her have it." "This one" referred to Aiko. As a tusukur, Alko was relaying the words of someone in the other world. Right away a kinasut-kamui noka (a form of the snake deity) was created, and Nitani-ekashi performed prayers. Aiko became calm, the rapid Ainu speech ended, and soon she revived.

Aiko reflected on this. While Hapo was alive, Aiko had secretly thought she would be happy to succeed to the art of midwifery, but not to that of tusu. The sudden visitation of the tusu phenomenon in this manner, she thought, meant that she was being punished for her attitude. After that, Aiko began to enter-tain a sense of mission about tusu, and thus kinasut-kamui became her guardian deity. As for her husband, he was eventually cured of malaria. According to Ainu medicine, cat saliva was effective for a disease accompanied by intermittent fever. Aiko repeatedly fed him food mixed, without his knowledge, with cats' leftovers.

Aiko performed tusu sometimes unconsciously and suddenly, but at other times by asking the fire deity to move a specific spirit to come down to her. The former phenomenon was and is quite rare, and spirits possessing her were limited to ancestors such as the first-generation midwife, or Hapo, or Aiko's own guardian deity. The latter phenomenon is similar to the so-called itako medium in northeast Honshň. In such instances she would speak to some appropriate spirit, such as the deceased grandmother or grandfather of the person who requested the consultation.

Going into the tusu state means mediating, as a kind of prophet, the words of a spirit. So the body that acts as a vehicle is also affected by the spirit. After being possessed by a heavenly spirit (for example, the first-generation midwife), the medium's physical condition improves; but after contact with a dark spirit, the medium becomes so exhausted that she may take to bed. Pre-monitory to the tusu state, vibrations occur all over the body. When the medium is for some reason reluctant to go into the tusu state, the vibrations are intense, whereas they tend to be modest when she feels willing. When the vibrations are over, she temporarily becomes another person. The time period of this change of consciousness is about ten seconds at minimum, and two to three minutes at most.

The gift of clairvoyance manifested itself in Aiko in 1955, when she was forty-one. Aiko was hospitalized with a tumor of the uterus at that time. After the operation, she caught the doctor saying in a low voice, "Oh, dear." When she questioned him, he confessed that he had left a piece of gauze in her body. Alko wanted to help the conscientious doctor who had acknowledged his error, so she called to her guardian deity and stayed in a tusu state almost all night. A long-bearded ekashi appeared in her vision. Slender and dressed in ceremonial Ainu clothing, he sat with his legs crossed, revealing shin hair. From around him, gentle, beautiful singing voices of other Ainu could be heard. Looking steadily at her, he gave her silent yet steady support. "I must be seeing the spiritual world," Aiko thought and thanked the ekashi. By the time his form disappeared, she felt at ease.

On the following day, an end of the gauze came out of the vaginal passage, so she pulled it out with her fingers. According to Aiko's explanation, each human has two types of deities: "a guardian spirit" and "a spirit that guides toward the higher." A guiding spirit instructs the person to a certain point, then is re-placed by another guide leading the way toward a yet higher region. Some people continue to train and progress from height to height, as Alko sees it, because their guiding spirit brings friends along. She interpreted the ekashi who appeared by her bedside that day as having been a guardian, the first of the two types.

From that time on, Aiko's clairvoyance grew stronger by the day. This power lets one see before one's eyes not only something taking place at a distance, but the future and past of someone seated before one. "To see" here means to view clearly delineated forms; it does not mean a vague, dreamlike vision or one limited within a frame, like a TV program or a movie. To borrow the words of Professor Chiri Mashiho, it is "clairvoyance that enables one to see, for example, the private parts of someone seated face to face with you.”

When a relative's wife was pregnant, Nagai Hiroshi asked Aiko one month or so before the birth whether the baby was a boy or a girl. Aiko, who could "see" the fetus of the woman in Sapporo, about sixty miles away, said it was a baby girl. When Nagai asked again one week before birth, Aiko said, "I see the baby but I'm not quite sure. Its umbilical cord is really fat and it's hiding the crucial part, so I can't see that spot. But, if it's a boy, I think I should see the chiehe (penis) peeking from behind it no matter how fat it is. So after all it may be a girl. Anyway, it's a plump baby with dark hair and a good complexion." When the baby was born, everything was exactly as she had predicted. I am told that it was a baby girl with an extremely fat umbilical cord.

In the preceding section, I noted Nagai Etsuko's surprise when, during their first conversation, Aiko discussed a past incident in Etsuko's life that Etsuko had never mentioned. Though she didn't know their names, Aiko said that she "saw" two young men who thought well of Etsuko. Etsuko had abandoned them, so to speak, in coming to Hokkaid?. Now Aiko "saw" another young man. Though he and Etsuko hadn't even spoken to each other, eventually she would marry him. This young man turned out to be Nagai Hiroshi.

Suffering from a heart condition, Aiko had retired in 1975 both from midwifery and tusu. The only delivery she handled after retirement was that of the fetus misdiagnosed as "a tumor or a lump of flesh" by two obstetricians, who were about to remove it from the uterus. The child was in elementary school in 1992.

Nagai Hiroshi estimates that Aiko treated nearly thirty thousand people with her midwifery, medicine, or consultation with the spirits by way of tusu.

Honda, Katsuichi. Harukor: An Ainu Woman’s Tale. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2000; 64-82.