Shogakukan Edition Learning Manga People Museum Yukie Chiri and Ainu Shogakukan Edition Learning Manga People Museum

The life of a girl who risked her life to learn the Ainu language.

The Ainu are an indigenous people of Japan who lived in Hokkaido, Karafuto, and the four northern islands. They were a hunter-gatherer people nurtured by rich nature, and they were an ethnic group with a unique culture that excelled in singing and dancing. However, when the Japanese government began to develop Hokkaido in the Meiji era, the situation changed. The Ainu were driven out of the land they lived in and were forced to become Japanese under the so-called "assimilation policy." The Ainu had language, but not letters. Thanks to Japanese language education, some people have gradually come to be unable to speak the Ainu language. Even the spiritual foundation of the Ainu language was being lost. Meanwhile, an Ainu girl, Yukie Chiri, and an Ainu language researcher, Kyosuke Kindaichi, have a fateful meeting. Her natural brilliance and her great storyteller from her grandmother, her Sachie was unique in her mastery of Ainu and Japanese. Together with Kindaichi, Yukie begins a big project that will last her life. It is "Ainu Shinyoshu".