Imagine living in a culture with none or very little of the following: politics, economics, property, history, time, agriculture, money, war ambition, heaven, hell, progress, writing ...

"They're dogs, not men!" snapped a certain Mr. Ito upon first encountering the Ainu of Hokkaido in August 1878. Ito (his first name is lost to history) was servant and interpreter to the famed British traveler Isabella Bird, whose own judgment was more generous — "magnificent savages," she said of them, though elsewhere in her "Unbeaten Tracks in Japan" (1880) she seems more struck by their savagery than their magnificence.

More of this interesting pair shortly. Who can speak better for the Ainu than an Ainu? Yukie Chiri was born in 1903 in southwestern Hokkaido. Her grandmother was a shaman-bard from whom as a child she absorbed the marvelous yucar — ageless, timeless oral tales it's surprising no one has mined for anime potential. Yukie died tragically young — at 19, of heart disease — after living just long enough to commit 13 yucar to writing for the first time and translate them into Japanese.