Lake Akan, in the Kushiro region of Japan’s northernmost main island Hokkaido, is home to world famous algae: free-floating, spherical-shaped verdant growths of Aegagropila linnaei known in Japanese as marimo (Figure 9.1). Marimo have accomplished a rare feat for an alga. They have become a charismatic species and are sold as “pets” in Japan and abroad. A popular website promoting Japanese culture puts it this way: “If you’re tired of fish but can’t find another pet (besides plants … which aren’t pets) to take care of, why don’t you try marimo?” (Tolentino 2014). In 2005, a Japanese souvenir company created Marimokkori, an anthropomorphized marimo intended to promote tourism to Hokkaido. (See Figure 9.2) The name is a portmanteau, combining the word marimo with the word mokkori, which refers to a “bulge” produced by male genitalia under clothing (Marimokkori’s round, green head is attached to a body with two arms and two legs with a conspicuous round bulge between them). Despite (or perhaps because of) this suggestive trait, Marimokkori remains a popular character that has appeared on a variety of souvenir goods, including a keychain in which he assumes the figure of a Buddha.
Marimo of various sizes
Photo courtesy of musicexpression
I first learned of marimo in 2001, when a friend gifted me one in a small glass bottle as a souvenir from a trip to Hokkaido. It sat on my desk in Tokyo, where I was studying Japanese language and literature as an undergraduate exchange student. I passed that marimo on to another friend when I returned to the United States, but my interest in the alga stayed with me. Years later, when I conducted my doctoral research on plant life in modern Japanese literature and cinema, I thought about marimo often. I was writing about authors and filmmakers who tried to rethink what it means to be human through a close engagement with plant life. Their novels, poems, and films imaginatively presented plants like mosses, vines, and trees as more similar to humans than is conventionally believed. I was tracking what I called a “botanical subjectivity” in these works, wherein humans attempted to experience the world in a plant-like manner. I was interested in how a botanical subjectivity was always presented as a multiple subjectivity – a subjective experience of a community rather than an individual, a forest rather than an individual tree. It struck me that marimo was a multiplicity in this way: a decentralized collection of filaments that seemed to constitute a singular being. I realized that this particular alga exists in popular consciousness somewhere on the spectrum between plant and animal (plants, after all, “aren’t pets”). While it could be said that all algae exist in this liminal space between plant and animal, marimo’s popularity marks it as a uniquely curious case. How, I wanted to know, did it become a household name in Japan in the first place?
Knowing that Lake Akan is home to the annual Marimo Festival, I began looking into the history of the region and quickly discovered that marimo’s own history is thoroughly entangled within Japan’s settler colonial history on Hokkaido. Central to Japan’s “development” of Hokkaido, which officially became a part of Japan in 1869, was its forced assimilation and cultural erasure of the island’s Indigenous Ainu population – settler colonial efforts to which the Marimo Festival seemed to be responding by celebrating Ainu culture. The festival features Ainu dance performances and culminates in a “sending off” ceremony in which a group of Ainu men row a hand-carved canoe out onto Lake Akan and return marimo to its waters. There is a dual nature to the festival that can be glimpsed in this latter ceremony, as it is intended to address both the suppression of Ainu culture and the endangered status of the marimo. One of the stated objectives of the festival is “protecting aegagropilas from poaching and the lowering of the water level due to hydroelectric power generation” (Irimoto 2004: 11).
Visitors to Lake Akan are generally led to believe that there is a long history of Ainu cultural affinity for the marimo, as the festival would suggest. Tourists are regularly greeted with a famous story long purported to be an Ainu folktale, one in which two young, star-crossed lovers jump into the lake and become a single marimo. This story piqued my interest, as it seemed to hint at a multiple subjectivity. Just as many filaments make up a single marimo, the two young lovers become one by becoming marimo. Conventionally called “The Legend of Marimo Love” (Koi marimo densetsu), the story is well-known throughout Japan and has taken form in numerous versions told across a wide range of media. But “The Legend of Marimo Love” is not a true Ainu folktale. It is, to borrow Richard M. Dorson’s term, “fakelore” – a tale falsely ascribed to a folkloric tradition, having been written by a non-Ainu Japanese author (Dorson 1976). And while it draws from Ainu ceremonial practices, the Marimo Festival itself is not a “traditional” ceremony, having been created in 1950 by parties both Ainu and non-Ainu. And yet, members of the Ainu community around Lake Akan – which is home to the Akanko Ainu Kotan settlement that serves as a tourist destination and site for Ainu cultural promotion – have embraced both the story and the festival for their role in promoting tourism to the region. This chapter maps how marimo became a charismatic symbol of imagined indigeneity, beginning around Lake Akan and spreading throughout Japan (and ultimately the world at large). It considers what it means for the alga to have been embraced by the Lake Akan Ainu community in the name of preservation twice-over: of the endangered alga and of Ainu identity itself.
1 A Brief Algal History of Lake Akan’s Marimo
The name “marimo” is comprised of two words: mari, which refers to a ball used for sports or play, and mo, which refers to aquatic plants like seaweed or algae. Despite its playfully evocative meaning, “marimo” is nevertheless a name that bears the legacy of Japanese settler colonialism. Aegagropila linnaei was given the name marimo by Kawakami Takiya (1871–1915), whose mention of the alga in 1898 in The Journal of Japanese Botany has been referred to as its “discovery” in Japan – a claim that effectively erases Ainu presence from the Lake Akan landscape (Nakazawa 1989: 14). Ainu ancestral lands once stretched from the northern end of Japan’s main island, Honshū, up through Hokkaido, and out across the Kuril Islands and southern Sakhalin island (lewallen 2016). By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the Ainu were conventionally believed to be a “dying race” and were effectively written out of Japanese history by the passage of the 1899 Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Act (Hudson, lewallen, and Watson 2014: 1). It would take until the year 2008 for the Japanese government to officially recognize the Ainu as indigenous to northern Japan.
When Kawakami first wrote of marimo, he was a student at Sapporo Agricultural College, which was originally founded in 1872 in Tokyo as the Kaitakushi Tentative School, with “Kaitakushi” being the name of the governmental agency tasked with the “development” of Hokkaido (Wakana 2013). The school’s purpose was to educate students to this end. It was relocated to Sapporo and renamed Hokkaido Imperial University in 1918, later becoming Hokkaido University, its current name, in 1947. While still a student, Kawakami was tasked by the local government in Hokkaido to survey both the weather and flora of the Lake Akan region. Such surveys were indispensable to a fledgling colonial government looking to transform the island of Hokkaido into the agricultural center it has become today.
But Kawakami’s connection to marimo ties the alga further into Japan’s colonial history, beyond the borders of Hokkaido, through imperial botany. Kawakami went on to name and document botanical species in Japanese- occupied Taiwan, where he helped establish the National Taiwan Museum and served as its inaugural director. In 1915, Kawakami published a travelogue/ botanical field guide based on his trips throughout the South Pacific titled In the Shade of Palm Trees (Yashi no hakage). In his preface to the work, Kawakami writes that his botanical research is an important contribution to Japan’s imperial expansion: “In my estimation, the South Pacific is a place we Japanese must certainly develop in the future, and we must exhaustively survey it from every aspect. Right now, it is of the utmost importance that we provide full knowledge of the true state of affairs to our nation” (Kawakami 1915: 11).1 One can imagine Kawakami felt similarly about his work cataloguing the plant life around Lake Akan, including marimo.
A little over twenty years after Kawakami first published on marimo, the Japanese government officially recognized the alga as worthy of conservation. Following the 1919 passing of the Historic Sites, Scenic Beauty, and Natural Monuments Preservation Law (Shiseki Meishō Tennenkinenbutsu Hozonho), the government declared Lake Akan marimo a “Natural Monument” in 1921. One of the key factors that lead to this declaration was the uniqueness of the freshwater alga’s biology. Of particular note was marimo’s spherical shape and limited distribution; while Aegagropila linnaei can be found growing attached to rocks and as unattached filaments, the environment of Lake Akan resulted in unusually large ball-shaped marimo. (To date, the largest on record was 34 cm in diameter.) While Aegagropila linnaei have been found in freshwater sources throughout Japan and Europe, Lake Akan’s marimo are renowned for their size. Another key factor leading to the designation of natural monument was the growing concern that human actions such as poaching could have adverse effects on the lake’s ecosystem, leading to the loss of this unique species (Wakana 2020).
Such fears were justified. Around the time of marimo’s designation as Natural Monument, a hydroelectric plant was established on the banks of the Akan River. As the river was used for electricity production, the water level of Lake Akan was lowered in areas in which marimo had accumulated. This led to marimo being exposed to the open air, causing many to dry out and die. In response to the increased energy demand occasioned by Japan’s postwar recovery effort, the situation at Lake Akan continued to worsen after the end of World War II. In the spring of 1950, the water level dropped below 60 centimeters in some areas, exposing and killing many marimo. This incident, which entered public discourse as the “Electricity or Marimo?” debate, served as the impetus for the upgrading of Lake Akan’s marimo to the status of “Special Natural Monument” in 1952 (Wakana 2020).
The “Electricity or Marimo?” debate also served as the background from which the Marimo Festival was created in 1950, the organizing guidelines of which highlighted its intention to promote conservation: “Various kinds of events are to unfold under the name of the ‘Marimo Festival’ to awaken people’s love, which (has) faded for the marimo, among people within the (Kushiro region), and inspire them to protect them in order to preserve the fresh green marimo which lives at the bottom of Lake Akan, famous for its grand scenic beauty, as an eternal cultural property” (Irimoto 2004: 12). Yet due to the continued harvesting of marimo for souvenir use and further polluting of Lake Akan, the marimo population continued to decline after the 1950s, and by 1997 they were deemed critically endangered (Soejima et al. 2009). They continue to hold this status to this day (Boedeker et al. 2010).
2 On the Origins of “The Legend of Marimo Love”
One year after Lake Akan marimo were given the status of “Natural Monument,” an unknown non-Ainu Japanese writer named Nagata Kōsaku published the story that would become “The Legend of Marimo Love” – the fakelore that would end up causing many to believe that there was a strong connection between the marimo and traditional Ainu culture. Nagata’s story, “The Sad Sound of the Reed Flute on the Wind Blowing Down from Mt. Akan” (Akan-oroshi ni kanashiki ashibue), first appeared in the collection Mountain Legends and Love Stories, published by the Osaka office of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. The book’s introduction lauds the “expansive” collection of stories contained within, which include “mysterious ones, ones that are dramatizations of historical fact, and ones passed down by way of oral tradition” (Wakana 2019a).2 The preface does not specify which stories belong to which category. But “The Sad Sound of the Reed Flute …” opens on the figure of an “elderly Ainu” who proceeds to tell the rest of the narrative, introducing it as “something that happened five-hundred years ago” (Nagata 1922: 173).3
This apparent oral folktale tells the tragic story of two young Ainu: Setona and Manibe (later, as the story took on a life of its own and spread through popular media, would his name change to Manipe). Setona is the daughter of the village chieftain. Manibe is the son of a servant who works for Setona’s family, and as such, is an inappropriate love match for her. To her dismay, Setona is instead promised to a vulgar man named Mekani. Near the end of the story, Manibe rescues Setona from Mekani’s forceful advances, upon which she confesses her love for Manibe. Duty-bound to his position as a servant to her father, Manibe tells Setona that they cannot be together. Setona never recovers from this refusal. She ends the story confined to bed, “crying as if she had lost her mind” (Nagata 1922: 180). Manibe, meanwhile, is confronted by a knife-wielding Mekani late at night. A scuffle ensues, and Manibe manages to get a hold of Mekani’s knife. He stabs Mekani, killing him on the spot. In fear, Manibe approaches the shore of Lake Akan and begins rowing his wooden canoe out onto the lake while blowing into his reed flute. He hears the sound of villagers rowing out after him. The story concludes:
After that night, the figure of Manibe was never to be seen again. A few days later, Setona died while continuing to call out the name of her beloved. And so, it is said that the two have become one, within a single marimo that lives in the depths of the lake, and that the sad sounds of a reed flute come blowing from Mt. Akan down to the lake, mixed with the sound of a woman’s crying (Nagata 1922: 181).
It is here that marimo makes its only appearance in Nagata’s story. Like the legend it would go on to become, Nagata’s story finds its two Ainu protagonists becoming a single marimo after dying tragic deaths. But whereas “The Legend of Marimo Love” conventionally ends with “Manipe” and Setona jumping into Lake Akan in an act of lovers’ suicide, Nagata’s source material does not. Thus, part of the story’s metamorphosis into “The Legend of Marimo Love” is its changed ending, in addition, of course, to its false attribution as an Ainu folktale.
How, then, did Nagata’s story become what it became: a tale of lovers’ suicide falsely ascribed to the tradition of Ainu mythology? This question weighed heavily on the mind of Wakana Isamu, the head researcher at the Kushiro International Wetland Center and one of the world’s foremost marimo experts. It was Wakana (who is known by his nickname “Dr. Marimo”) who first published on the connection between “The Legend of Marimo Love” and Nagata’s forgotten source material. In a series of columns written for the Kushiro Shimbun newspaper between June 2018 and March 2019 (and later collected on his website), Wakana explains that over the thirty some-odd years that he has spent researching marimo, he has come across several texts that convinced him that “The Legend of Marimo Love” was not an Ainu story, but rather a creation of a Japanese writer (or wajin, which is the term often used to distinguish non-Ainu Japanese from Ainu).
While Wakana was the first to publish about Nagata’s story being the source material for “The Legend of Marimo Love,” he was not the first to doubt its authenticity. He mentions a specific essay by Satō Naotarō titled “On Marimo” (Marimo ni tsuite), which was included in a 1961 three-volume collection chronicling Satō’s research on his native Kushiro region. In this essay, Satō claims that “The Legend of Marimo Love” is not an authentic Ainu folktale and that it began as a story included in the 1926 volume Ainu Folklore (Ainu no densetsu), compiled by Aoki Junji. The story Satō mentions, titled “The Sad Sound of a Reed Flute” (Kanashiki ashibue), is nearly identical to Nagata’s version, but with a few key differences (Wakana 2019a). The most obvious difference is that the 1926 version is not ascribed to any particular author, even though it is clearly based on Nagata’s story. It cuts out the character of the Ainu storyteller from Nagata’s original version and renders Nagata’s classically inflected literary prose into a more colloquial form of the Japanese language. These changes, bolstered by the fact that Nagata’s name was not attached to the story, surely helped give it an aura of authenticity as “Ainu folklore,” as the book’s title suggests and its introduction outright claims when it says that “the stories included here are ones that I searched for in old documents, read thoroughly in exhaustive research on folklore, and furthermore, heard personally from the elderly inhabitants of Ainu villages” (Aoki 1924: 1).4 And yet this 1926 version of the story ends with a note that reads “From Mountain Legends and Love Stories” – the name of the 1922 book that featured Nagata’s tale.
Having seen this note, Wakana decided to track down a copy of Mountain Legends and Love Stories, and thereupon developed his own suspicions that it was Nagata’s version that was the true original. Then, out of the blue in 2017, he received a letter from Nagata’s son, Natsuo. The letter explained how Natsuo wanted to clear up the origins of “The Legend of Marimo Love” for posterity’s sake. Natsuo writes that his father had spent some time working in Kushiro, and while there, heard a story from an Ainu elder with whom he become acquainted. The story concerned a pair of young lovers from rival Ainu settlements who eventually drowned themselves in a lovers’ suicide (Wakana 2019b). It was this story that apparently served as Nagata’s inspiration when he later wrote “The Sad Sound of the Reed Flute on the Wind Blowing Down from Mt. Akan.” However, given the fact that Nagata’s story does not actually end with a lovers’ suicide, one may wonder whether this anecdote is not a last-minute attempt to recuperate some amount of authenticity by linking the fakelore to an Ainu source in some small way. In any case, it is clear that marimo were added to the story at Nagata’s discretion, likely owing to its having been granted “Natural Monument” status the previous year.
In the shift from Nagata’s version to Aoki’s modification of the story, the tale began its process of “becoming Ainu.” I use this term in reference to a critical intervention into global indigenous studies laid out by ann-elise lewallen in her monograph The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan.5 In her study, lewallen calls the self-fashioning of identity that she examines in relation to clothwork “becoming Ainu,” and argues that the term marks an important break from a biological view of indigeneity that “shifts the focus from a predetermined ‘innate Ainuness’ to an Ainuness selectively forged by each individual, thereby displacing the centrality of blood in regulating ethnicity and recentering individual agency and the process of self-determination” (lewallen 2016, 1). The transformation that begins with Aoki’s version of the story and ends with the conventional assumption that “The Legend of Marimo Love” is an Ainu folktale did not come through a “process of self-determination,” but rather through a long process of interpolation, understood here as a tool of assimilation in which wajin (non-Ainu Japanese) actors crafted an imagined indigenous cosmology from the outside, and imposed a cultural significance on the tale (and consequently the marimo itself) that had no historical basis. Marimo’s “becoming Ainu” was thus initially a matter of “being made Ainu.”
As a rare species that aroused public imagination, marimo served as a kind of botanical terra nullius (or planta nullius) that was ripe for such inscription within a settler colonial system. Hokkaido had been deemed a terra nullius of its own, portrayed as a vast, empty frontier that, in Michele Mason’s words, “served the state’s goals by acting as a foil to confirm Japan’s superior status and rationalize the colonial project” wherein its configuration as “a purely natural space, devoid of human habitation, history, and culture” not only rendered its Indigenous inhabitants an ahistorical blank slate, but also found newly “discovered” species like marimo free of any pre-existing cultural connotations (Mason 2012: 58). Trees, flowers, and grasses all had centuries of well-worn cultural associations in Japan, but marimo had no such deep aesthetic history.6 Likewise, other species of algae had long culinary histories in Japan (as detailed in Ole G. Mouritsen and J. Lucas Pérez-Lloréns’ contribution to this volume), but no such history existed for marimo on the Japanese mainland. Nor was there any use of the alga akin to the production of agar (the subject of Melody Jue’s chapter in this book). This lack of Japanese knowledge and use of the alga made it easy for someone like Nagata or Aoki to dream up fakelore that linked the marimo to Ainu culture. As a planta nullis, marimo could be “made Ainu” from the outside – its aesthetic “otherness” bolstered by its new association with the colonial “other” of the Ainu. It was on this botanical blank slate that “The Legend of Marimo Love” was inscribed as fakelore, over and over again.
3 Singing Marimo
Nagata’s short story metamorphosized in the years following its publication in 1922. By 1931, it had taken on enough of a life of its own that the Kushiro Shimbun newspaper ran an article promoting an upcoming radio broadcast devoted to “local Ainu folklore” that included a tale in which two Ainu lovers jump into the lake and become a single marimo through death – which, again, was not the original ending of the story (Wakana 2019c). But this version of the tale gained traction in the Lake Akan region as a means to promote tourism (especially after the establishment of the Marimo Festival in 1950), leading to a song inspired by the story to become a nation-wide hit in 1953. “Song of the Marimo” (Marimo no uta), written by lyricist Iwase Hiroshi and composer Yashima Hideaki, was performed by popular singer Andō Mariko, who was born near Lake Akan, in Kitami. The song has since been covered numerous times and, like “The Legend of Marimo Love,” it can often be heard in tourist establishments around the lake.
“Song of the Marimo” has three verses. The first mentions Lake Akan by name and speaks of the “lonely wind that crosses the surface of the water.” It addresses the “floating marimo” directly, asking them what they are thinking. The second verse continues:
Biologist Sakai Yoshio begins his 1991 book The Science of Marimo (Marimo no kagaku) by disputing this verse’s claim that Lake Akan’s marimo float and sink depending on the weather. “To be sure,” he writes, “marimo in a laboratory aquarium with good light will float and sink, but in Lake Akan, they don’t move the way the song claims” (Sakai 1991: iv).7 Clearly, the “Song of the Marimo” was still popular enough some four decades after it was released that Sakai felt the need to dispel the misinformation it promoted.
But what Sakai does not feel the need to address is the song’s invocation of the “The Legend of Marimo Love.” For what is hinted at in the second verse (“love becomes one with sorrow”) becomes explicit in the third verse:
The lyrics of “Song of the Marimo” engraved into rock on the shores of Lake Akan
Photo courtesy of 663highland
While it does not mention Manipe and Setona by name, the song references their doomed romance. It would seem that by 1953, the fakelore was known well enough that it could be referenced in such an indirect way and still connect with a national audience that understood the referent. Today, a large stone memorial bearing the song’s lyrics sits on the shore of Lake Akan (Figure 9.3). The story it tells, a secondhand product of imagined indigeneity, stands literally engraved into the landscape.
4 Dancing Marimo
Said landscape would go on to serve as the setting for an international collaboration between a Japanese composer and a Russian ballet dancer during the height of the Cold War that once again suggested “The Legend of Marimo Love” was an Ainu tale. In 1962, composer Ishii Kan debuted his ballet Marimo in Tokyo. Four years earlier, he had won a prize for his composition titled Symphonia Ainu. Ishii was invited to compose the music for Marimo by the Tchaikovsky Commemorative Ballet School of Japan, which also invited A.A. Warlarmov from the Bolshoi Ballet School in Russia to help develop the production.
According to the liner notes included in the soundtrack album for Marimo, Warlarmov “became very interested in the legend about the ‘marimo’” and thus “carried out research on the customs of the Ainu” (Marimo Ballet Suite, n.d.). Warlarmov reportedly visited the Ainu community at Lake Akan and made recordings of Ainu music and 8mm videos of Ainu dance. He also consulted with Japanese artists and intellectuals in order to avoid having his ballet turn into an “inappropriate work made by a foreigner” (Saitō 2018). Perhaps most notable among Warlarmov’s consultants was author Takeda Taijun, whose 1955 novel Forest and Lake Festival (Mori to mizu’umi no matsuri) is set around Lake Akan and features, in its opening a chapter, a tour guide who “must recite the tragic love story” of Setona and Manipe “countless times each day” (Takeda 1962: 17).
The fact that “The Legend of Marimo Love” was fakelore seems not to have been communicated to Warlarmov, and so Manipe and Setona became the focus of the ballet he helped author even as he reportedly strove for authenticity. The story once again took on a new iteration. In the ballet, Setona is no longer the village chief’s daughter. In this version, she is poor, and meets Manipe as he saves her from a bear attack. The two fall in love, but it is Manipe who ends up being forced to marry another. In order to nullify Manipe’s engagement to this other woman, Setona must face a series of challenges to appease the god of Lake Akan. She has her eyes plucked out and loses her ability to hear and speak. Manipe recognizes Setona despite these changes when she arrives at his wedding ceremony. The two leave the ceremony together. Manipe then faces three challenges of his own: he is attacked by a murder of crows, forced to struggle against a massive windstorm, and is told that he must leave his life behind and jump into the lake, where he will then find his beloved. Having completed these tasks, the two become marimo, and dance “a pas de deux of love” (Marimo Ballet Suite, n.d.).
5 Another Legend of Becoming Marimo
Through song and dance, the fakelore that is “The Legend of Marimo Love” took on new forms and found new life as inspiration for variations on a theme that was still believed by many to be an Ainu folktale. But not everyone believed the story’s supposed provenance. It was Satō Naotarō’s essay that convinced Wakana Isamu that “The Legend of Marimo Love” was not a true Ainu folktale, but Satō was not alone is doubting its origins. Poet, farmer, and Anarchist Sarashina Genzō (1904–1985), for example, raised doubts about the authenticity of “The Legend of Marimo Love” in the first volume of his three-volume account of Ainu ecology titled A Kotan Wildlife (Kotan seibutsuki), which was originally published in 1942 and then revised and republished in 1976. Sarashina, who was born in Hokkaido to first generation wajin settlers and both collected Ainu folklore and wrote about Ainu life in his poetry, devotes a section of this first volume of A Kotan Wildlife to marimo. He begins the section with a direct reference to “The Legend of Marimo Love,” claiming that marimo is “the main character of (the story), which you are bound to hear somewhere if you visit Lake Akan” (Sarashina and Sarashina 2020: 257).8 But, Sarashina points out, as beautiful as that story is, it is not to be found in any of the Ainu tales handed down from antiquity.
Sarashina writes that there is, however, a tale known among the elderly Ainu around Lake Akan concerning marimo, but that it is radically different in tone from “The Legend of Marimo Love.” He recounts it as follows:
Long ago, for some reason, the god of Lake Akan disliked water chestnuts (pekanpe in Ainu). Yet somehow or other, some water chestnuts found their way into the lake, and hoping for company, they asked the god to help them multiply. The god replied coldly, “Just by being here, you dirty up the lake. And if your numbers were to grow, humans would come to collect you, and further muck up this beautiful lake. By no means can I allow you to be here.” This angered the water chestnuts, and they plucked up the grass along the lake shore and all the water plants and threw them all at the god of the lake They then left. The grass and water plants became entangled in refuse, thus forming marimo. And so, the Ainu word for marimo is tokarip (which means “that which lies in the lake”) (Sarashina and Sarashina 2020: 258).
Sarashina notes that this folktale is in no way a “love story” and explains that Ainu feelings toward marimo were less than favorable. He recounts that he was taught by Ainu elders that as marimo numbers increase, it becomes difficult to catch fish. He lists a few other Ainu words for marimo that express this dislike of the alga: torasanpe (or “lake goblin”) and tosuruku (or “lake poison”). Sarashina concludes that “If there is a story claiming to be an Ainu folktale that has a beautiful love story written into it, we can be sure, without a doubt, that it is a fictional tale written by a wajin” (Sarashina and Sarashina 2020: 258). The fact that his Kotan Wildlife would gain mainstream popularity some seventy years later due to its association with the highly popular and yet controversial manga Golden Kamuy (which began serialization in 2014) would likely have amused Sarashina. The story, which is set in Hokkaido around the turn of the 20th century, briefly features a scene in which a child moves to Lake Akan and is bullied into eating marimo (Noda 2020). It is a scene befitting the description of marimo as “lake goblin.”
6 On Becoming Ainu through Becoming Marimo
Yet even before Sarashina attempted to set the record straight, Yamamoto Tasuke (1904–1993), who would become a major figure in the Ainu independence movement after the war and the driving force behind the creation the Marimo Festival in 1950, was writing of the inauthenticity of “The Legend of Marimo Love.” In 1940, Yamamoto published his own collection of Ainu folk tales titled Akan National Park and Ainu Folklore (Akan kokuritsu kōen to Ainu no densetsu) and included a version of “The Legend of Marimo Love” that he called “The Tale of Setona and the Marimo.” Yamamoto summarizes the story and follows the conventional telling, including the lover’s suicide at the end. But his framing of the story casts doubts on its origin. Yamamoto suggests the story is in fact fakelore: “In order to write this book, I conducted research for three years in the Akan area, but none of the Lake Akan Ainu knew this famous legend” (Yamamoto 1940: 16).9
Given that Yamamoto knew “The Legend of Marimo Love” was not a story told among the Ainu community at Lake Akan, his decision to include it in his collection can be seen as a first step toward reclaiming the fakelore. His inclusion of the story was an effort to “become Ainu” within lewallen’s parameters of the term, in which “self-craft describes a process of forging an Ainu identity firmly rooted in ancestral values, worldview, and lifeways, but one that is sufficiently flexible to adapt these values to meet the needs of the present” (lewallen 2016, 2). Yamamoto seemed to understand that marimo was a planta nullis and decided to begin an inscription of his own. He saw the potential to reclaim the supposed “Ainu-ness” of marimo perpetuated by “The Legend of Marimo Love” and use the alga’s imagined indigeneity to self-craft a new tradition ten years later in the form of The Marimo Festival – a tradition that better reflected Ainu “ancestral values, worldview, and lifeways.” A brochure for the Akanko Ainu Kotan that promotes the festival elaborates on these values and lifeways:
The Ainu people are an indigenous people to Hokkaido where they lived for countless generations before the arrival of the sisam (Japanese). Their ancestors referred to Hokkaido as Ainu Mosir (tranquil land of the people) and believed spirits, or kamuy, inhabited the natural world. They humbly paid homage to these kamuy and lived in thanks of the bounty of nature. Under the spirit of coexistence symbolized by the saying “I am where the kamuy are and the kamuy are where I am,” the Ainu people have lived in harmony with their surroundings without modifying, destroying or polluting the natural environment (Honda 2013: 2).
Created to help preserve both Ainu cultural heritage and the endangered alga itself, the Marimo Festival thus enacts a form of traditional ecological knowledge in which the sacrality of the natural world informs ecological conservation. As a first step toward self-fashioning a cultural relationship to marimo that would ultimately result in the creation of the Marimo Festival, Yamamoto’s Akan National Park and Ainu Folklore ultimately becomes a site of resistance within a settler colonial logic that looked to define what is and what is not authentic Ainu tradition.
At the same time, however, the Marimo Festival has held (and continues to hold) a contested, ambiguous status among the Ainu. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki has argued, “the preservation and presentation of culture have been deeply contested, divisive, and problematic issues for Ainu society” (Morris-Suzuki 2014: 50). The Marimo Festival is no exception. In director Fukunaga Takeshi’s 2020 film Ainu Mosir, which is a story about the Ainu community around Lake Akan that features actors from the local community, the Marimo Festival is presented as primarily public-facing and is contrasted with a controversial bear sending-off ceremony that the film’s narrative portrays as a more authentic and private ritual.10 Indeed, since its inception, the Marimo Festival has been criticized for exploiting Ainu culture for the sake of tourism. In the face of such criticism, Yamamoto has defended the creation of the event as a means “to regain our pride” (Ziomek 2019: 367). The Akanko Ainu Kotan continues to defend the festival as a way to “offer devout prayer to the kamuy (spirits) through the marimo” and thus turn Lake Akan “into a focal point for the Ainu people to pass down their spiritual heritage to future generations” (Honda 2013: 19).
Yamamoto recognized the flexibility that the ambiguous status of the marimo afforded him in regard to notions of authenticity. He used this ambiguity to reawaken an Ainu culture he felt had faded in the wake of World War II, claiming that “when the Ainu came to gather for the (Marimo) festival, I saw a forgotten people … become excited. It was planned as a cultural exchange. As a result, in each region the practice of Ainu dances began again. Each year the Ainu came together and the level of the arts continued to improve, and their spirit changed” (Ziomek 2019: 368). lewallen notes that tourism has been a “double-edged sword” for Ainu communities, as it “has packaged Ainu cultural knowledge and difference for mass consumption” while also “(serving) as an incubator to maintain this knowledge and link culture once again with economic livelihood” (lewallen 2016: 90). Yet she also stresses that tourist communities like the one at Akanko Ainu Kotan, “have enabled the preservation of Ainupuri (proper comportment based on ancestral protocols) and conservation of the natural resources necessary to sustain it” (lewallen 2016: 92).
Yamamoto’s reclamation of “The Legend of Marimo Love” and subsequent creation of the Marimo Festival can thus be read as an act of “becoming Ainu” through an agential self-inscription onto the planta nullius that is the marimo. And now that it has been firmly established that “The Legend of Marimo Love” is fakelore, members of the Akanko Ainu Kotan appear willing to let the story continue to circulate in order to draw visitors to Lake Akan. A 2017 newspaper article titled “‘The Legend of Marimo Love’ was the Creation of an Ethnic Japanese (Wajin)” closes with the words of Nishida Masao, the head of the Ainu Craft Collective at the Akanko Ainu Kotan who can be seen participating in the Marimo Festival in Fukunaga’s film: “The story’s plot is interesting, and it encourages tourism to Lake Akan. It’s fine to continue introducing this story to people from here on out, as long as we make it clear that it’s not an Ainu legend” (Hokkaidō Shimbun 2017).11
7 Coda: Invasive Algae
In March 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued an alert to anyone who had purchased “a moss ball aquatic plant product” after February 1st of the same year, asking them to “Destroy! Don’t Dump!” their marimo. The charismatic pet algae, it was discovered, had been quietly smuggling an invasive species into the United States: the zebra mussel. The alert calls the zebra mussel “one of the most destructive invasive species in North America” as it “can quickly take over once they get established in a waterbody and cause significant damage” (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service). To ward off this threat of invasion, the Fish and Wildlife Service mandated marimo be destroyed through freezing, boiling, or bleaching, and then be disposed of in sealed plastic bags.
Given marimo’s place within the settler colonial history of Hokkaido, the concerns over its invasive potential and the systematic plan to eradicate its existence in North America take on an uncanny hue. Once again marimo finds itself being used by invasive actors, its charismatic charm hiding the threat of uncontrolled expansion hidden within its green “body.” The invasive marimo in question, however, did not come from Lake Akan, but rather were imported into California from Ukraine (Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks). According to a 2010 article published in BioScience, Ukraine has been the major supplier of Aegagropila linnaei to the international aquarium trade, with the alga being harvested from the Shatsk lakes (Boedeker et al. 2010: 192).12 Chain retailers such as Petco pulled these “lake goblins” off their shelves, although one can still purchase them from online retailers that continue to mistakenly promote “The Legend of Marimo Love” as an authentic Ainu folktale (Moss Ball Pets). And recently, marimo have begun appearing on pet shop shelves once again.
It is tempting to see this zebra mussel-infested chapter of marimo history as something of a conclusion to the long tale of becoming marimo that began with Nagata Kōsaku’s decision to write fakelore in 1922. As he wrote of an imaginary indigenous cosmology in which Ainu lovers became forever united within a single marimo, Nagata set off a chain of events that would distance the marimo further and further from Ainu traditional ecological knowledge. As “The Legend of Marimo Love” helped fuel the commodification of the marimo, the alga eventually entered into an economic network of international distribution that would take it from Ukrainian lakes to the United States, where it would come to threaten the very waterways that would serve as its new expanded ecosystem.
And thus, while consumers who may have been lured in by the romantic tale of Manipe and Setona must now freeze, boil, and/or bleach their marimo in preparation for the unbecoming that is disposal, the community around Lake Akan prepare for another year of the perpetual becoming that is the Marimo Festival, where they will sing and dance and return marimo to the watery depths of the lake from whence they came. In the process, their actions will echo the words of Norway-based Ainu artist Uzawa Kanako, who describes her contemporary take on traditional Ainu dance as “a new way to emphasize” the “continuously developing” nature of culture. “As I am of a generation that is the result of strong assimilation”, she continues, “I feel I have lost many aspects of traditional culture but I refuse to accept that I am not in touch with my culture when I choose to author it in my own way” (Uzawa 2014: 89).
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Translation by the Author.
Translation by the Author.
Translation by the Author.
Translation by the Author.
lewallen chooses to write her name in the lower case and I follow suit throughout.
In classical Japanese poetry, for example, plants were codified by lexicons called saijiki, which were essentially dictionaries of “seasonal words” (kigo) that regulated how and when plant names could be used.
Translation by the Author.
Translation by the Author.
Translation by the Author.
While director Fukunaga was raised near Lake Akan, he does not identify as Ainu himself.
Translation by the Author.
The article explains: “Balls from Lake Svityaz are shipped even to aquatic plant-breeding facilities in Southeast Asia before they are returned to the European market. Japanese aquarium shops sell balls only of European origin. No other natural source of A. linnaei balls other than the Shatsk lakes (including Lake Svityaz) was ever mentioned by people in the aquarium plant-trade business” (Boedeker et al. 2010: 192).