yukar

Imekanu also continued the work of transcribing and translating yukar.

Arthur Waley, one of the poem's translators, felt that the yukar seems to "break off" rather than come to an end.

Professor Kyōsuke Kindaichi collected yukar and translated them into Japanese.

He is chiefly known for his dictations of yukar, or sagas of the Ainu people.

Yukar (Ainu epic)

Eventually, Kindaichi persuaded her to join him in Tokyo to assist him in his work collecting and translating yukar.

She chose to record the tales her grandmother chanted, using romaji to express the Ainu sounds, and then translated the transcribed yukar into Japanese.

The Ainu have a rich oral tradition of hero-sagas called yukar, which retain a number of grammatical and lexical archaisms.

One of their Yukar Upopo, or legends, tells that "They lived in this place a hundred thousand years before the Children of the Sun came".

Classical Ainu, the language of the yukar, is polysynthetic, with incorporation of nouns and adverbs; this is greatly reduced in the modern colloquial language.

Records of these poems began to be kept only in the late 19th century, by Western missionaries and Japanese ethnographers; however, the Ainu tradition of memorizing the yukar preserved many.

'beautiful form') is the Ainu name, sung in yukar, for a cluster of geographical features in an area now within the municipalities of Nayoro and Ishikari, Hokkaidō, Japan.

When Kindaichi explained the value he saw in preserving Ainu folklore and traditions to Chiri, she decided to dedicate the rest of her life to studying, recording, and translating yukar (Kindaichi 1997).

Many of the Ainu dialects, even from one end of Hokkaido to the other, were not mutually intelligible; however, the classic Ainu language of the Yukar, or Ainu epic stories, was understood by all.

Without a writing system, the Ainu were masters of narration, with the Yukar and other forms of narration such as the Uepeker (Uwepeker) tales, being committed to memory and related at gatherings, often lasting many hours or even days.