Hokkaidō Museum of Literature
Literary archive tracing Hokkaido's writers from Ainu oral epics to modern novelists.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Hokkaidō Museum of Literature in Sapporo centers on a slim, pencil-ruled manuscript in its cases, copied out by nineteen-year-old Chiri Yukie the night she died in a borrowed Tokyo room. It follows the Ainu yukar she was transcribing, chants believed to carry the voice of a spirit and passed down only by ear, never meant to be written at all. You'll hear about her grandmother Monashinouku, one of the last fluent reciters, and her aunt Imekanu, who filled roughly one hundred sixty notebooks trying to preserve the same songs. Look closely at the two columns on the page, one phonetic Ainu, one Japanese, set down in the same careful hand.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Sapporo Ainu Culture Promotion Center
Reconstructed Ainu village with hand-touch artifacts, a carved canoe, and traditional cise dwellings by a forested river.
Botanic Garden, Hokkaidō University
Historic wooded botanical garden with a wooden museum of Ainu artifacts and taxidermied specimens.
Hokkaido Prefectural Migishi Kotaro Museum
Modernist art museum built around a painter's obsession with lone clowns, butterflies, and shells.
Sapporo City Buried Cultural Property Center
Excavated clay figurine buried with shark teeth and red ochre, later reborn as a Sapporo Snow Festival sculpture.
Kitakaro Sapporo Honkan Cafe
Taisho-era public library turned Tadao Ando-designed confectionery hall inside a preserved stone facade.