Ainu Music

Ainu music is built primarily around the human voice and two iconic instruments: the mukkuri, a bamboo mouth harp played by women, and the tonkori, a five-string plucked board zither. The yukar tradition is a sung epic narrative, sometimes hours long, performed in a chanting style that hovers between speech and song. Group songs called upopo are sung sitting in a circle, with hand-clapping and overlapping rhythmic patterns. There is no fixed scale system in the Western sense; melodies move within a narrow pentatonic range.

The Ainu are the indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. The Japanese state did not formally recognise them as an indigenous people until 2008. A century of assimilation policy nearly eliminated the language, but a cultural revival from the 1970s onward — led by figures such as Umeko Ando and the OKI Dub Ainu Band — has restored some of the song traditions to public performance. The Upopoy National Ainu Museum opened in Shiraoi in 2020.

The mukkuri produces both a sustained pitch and a percussive rhythm at the same time, controlled by the player's mouth shape. In group upopo songs, voices enter staggered, creating overlapping rhythmic loops that sound something like a round but follow different rules. The yukar narrative voice carries a particular slow, descending cadence at the end of each line.

Umeko Ando's Ihunke (2001) is the canonical modern recording, produced by OKI. The OKI Dub Ainu Band's Tonkori (2005) extends the tradition into a dub-influenced band format.

The tonkori was nearly lost as a living instrument by the mid-twentieth century — there were a handful of surviving players when OKI began rebuilding the technique in the 1990s.