I waited for him to wake up and told him that I had seen him dance many times and that I wanted to know who he was.  Now I was able to go back to heaven without any regrets, I told him, but I would like to know why you dance so well, and why you show your dance to the gods.

The kamui of the small pot answered by telling me that the woman of the house always cleans him right away and then he feels so good that he likes to dance.  He also has a lot of opportunity to do so, he explained, because there are many people at these feasts and she only uses the larger pots.  He lets the gods see him, but no one has ever guessed who he was.  I did, he continued, because I am a superior god.

No, I answered.  I told him that I had to come many times before I discovered his secret.  The hunter in this household has become very rich as I had returned time and time again.  So, because you have brought me back so often, you are the cause of his riches, and you have thanked the household for taking such good care of you.  I then thanked the god of the small pot and went back to heaven with more gifts of meat, sake, and inau than ever before.

In a very real sense, the iyomante is the central religious act for the Ainu, the focus of myth and epic as well as a charter for the traditional culture and behavior of the Ainu, through which they establish their unique relationship with the rest of their world.  That world is alive with wondrous and active beings, all of which are important to the Ainu.  Their stories are the key to that world, as tradition, explanation, religion, and scripture.  To live as an Ainu is to see and to understand the bears and the gods of the Ainu tales.

Pack Carnes is associate professor of Japanese studies and folklore at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois. Carnes has written numerous books and articles on language and folklore, especially on the fable, the joke, and other short folk narratives; the latest of these are latest of these are Fable Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985) and : Essays on the Relationship of the Proverb and the Fable (Bern: PeterLang, 1988). He is presently writing a two-volume work on Japanese folkloristics.