Oki and his tonkori. Courtesy of Chikar Studio

With luxuriant hair and chiseled features seldom found in the Japanese, Oki was teasingly nicknamed “Ainu” as a kid growing up in Tokyo. He had his suspicions there was a grain of truth to that description. But it wasn’t until he visited relatives in Hokkaido in his 20s that he realized his father was in fact a descendant of the famously hirsute people who used to inhabit a wide territory comprising northern Japan, Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands. Like many Ainu who feared discrimination, Oki’s father had hidden his past from his son.

“There were questions, and I got the answer, but it wasn’t a surprise,” Oki recalled recently in an interview at his record company’s Tokyo office. This was a time when he was at a low point. Disillusioned with a career in television commercial production that took him to New York for several years, he’d moved to Hokkaido in search of a change. Oki, now in his 40s, ended up living next door to an Ainu elder, who taught him the language and culture.

One evening, a cousin who ran an Ainu museum threw a tonkori at him, telling him he should take up the little-used instrument. Oki soon fell in love with the ungainly object, but the challenge was how to learn a musical tradition that was essentially dead. “I listened to old recordings by musicologists,” he explains. “A couple of [Japanese] musicologists can play tonkori and are authorized as traditional players. But why do I have to ask Japanese people about my own culture? When Ainu want to learn Ainu language or tonkori, they have to knock on the door of Japanese linguists or musicologists, but I can’t do that because of my pride. That’s why
I still say I don’t know how to play the tonkori.”

Oki credits his stubbornness and “idiot spirit” for making him the international apostle of the tonkori that he is today. Oki’s recent albums, including his first overseas release, last year’s Dub Ainu Deluxe, as well as his traditional solo album Tonkori and his work with musicians from other cultures such as the Celts and the Tuareg, have recently reached a wide audience. His appearances at the prestigious WOMAD world music festival in 2004 and 2005 were highly acclaimed, and he has his sights set on nothing less than Carnegie Hall.

Oki also has high hopes for his brand-new, self-titled album Dub Ainu Band. Fronting the group is fellow Ainu Futoshi Ikabe who also performs traditional dance on stage, but the rest of the members consist of some of the cream of the crop of Japan’s community of dub musicians. Navigating the tricky waters of placing a tribal instrument into a contemporary context without sounding trite, Oki’s spartan tonkori lines have an elegant simplicity that meshes organically with the heavy dub rhythms laid down by his bandmates.

The decision to put the tonkori into a reggae setting wasn’t for musical reasons alone. Oki also finds commonality with the disavowal of “Babylon” and search for a pre-colonial identity at the heart of Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley’s Rastafarian creed. “Great-great-grandfather says: People who forget their ancestors are trees without roots,” he sings in the Ainu language on the song “Topattumi” (“Overtaken”). That search isn’t made easy, however, by the fact that there are probably less than 1,000 Ainu that still speak the language.

As in many tribal communities, there is much debate within the Ainu between those who want to uphold traditions and those who wish to live as contemporary Japanese. “A couple of years ago, many criticized me for playing too much reggae, so I decided to release a traditional tonkori album,” he notes. “It was a good experience, but my Ainu quest is a personal thing. My children are Ainu, but maybe they won’t care about Ainu culture, and that’s all right. I’ll make space for them to return to their culture anytime if they want to. That’s my role.”

Many Ainu songs are prayers to kamuy, the bear deity central to Ainu religion. Bear meat and salmon formed the basis of the Ainu diet, but even during Oki’s grandfather’s times, traditional ways of hunting were a thing of the past. The song “Iyomante Upopo” tells the story of a successful hunt with a decidedly modern twist. It’s about his grandfather, a bear hunter and proprietor of a souvenir shop in a national park, who ventures into the snow-covered mountains in springtime and shoots a bear. “My grandfather hurried back down the mountain to the Aibetsu post office, where he sent a telegram to [his village] Chikapni,” reads a translation of the lyrics. “Villagers who heard the news immediately set off for the Aibetsu mountains to help carry the fresh bear meat.”

Once the sole preserve of men, the tonkori, strung with deer tendons, was used in shamanic rites or, for example, to give notice of one’s presence and ward off attack when passing through another clan’s territory. But its authentic traditions were already in decline centuries ago, as Ainu hunting-and-gathering culture gave way to the industrial society of the Japanese colonists. Oki illustrates this with a story.

“In the Edo period 200 years ago, a Japanese guy went to Sakhalin to look for tonkori players, and found an old man who could play very well. He asked the Ainu elder if he knew of any other players, but the guy answered that there weren’t any others. They’d all gone to work in the Japanese fish factories.”

A decade ago, the Ainu of Hokkaido came to what Oki describes as a Faustian bargain with the Japanese government. “Recently there’s been a return to traditional chanting,” he says of Ainu prayer. “Some are also starting to learn the Ainu language. There’s been a lot of rediscovery thanks to funding from the Japanese government for cultural activities. But we had to give up talking about land rights. That was the deal.”

For Oki, the modern concept of a nation-state defined by permanent borders is itself anathema. “Ainu didn’t have any concept of building a nation. Our music is from a land without a system, because our system was in nature. Sometimes people ask me why Ainu don’t want independence. We don’t have any concept of building a country, and countries only create problems. Look at what man is doing to this planet. We knew this 1,000 years ago. That’s the first, basic knowledge people need to understand who we are.”

Unit, Jan 26. See concert listings (jazz/world) for details.

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