Ancient layers of the Japanese psyche as seen from the tales and dreams of the Ainu culture

Today’s psychology premises a modernistic subject based in the European thought that targets the closed inner worlds of individuals. The establishment of the subject “I” in the Japanese language is ambiguous, and the subject is unclear compared to European’s modern ego. In this chapter, the Ainu culture, which has lasted through the modern age in the northern part of Japan, was introduced as another clue to form the image of ancient layers of the Japanese psyche with traces of the Jomon period (c. 14,000-300 BCE) that had thrived throughout Japanese Islands for more than 10,000 years. In the Jomon culture, everything in this present life was a cyclical contemplation of death, circulating between the present life and the afterlife. The Ainu culture also believed that the human beings and so as Kamuy, as divine, had their unique afterlife and had the ability to circulate back and forth between their respective present life and afterlife. For the Ainu, dreams were real and actual and they were means to connect humans with transcendental beings such as Kamuys and the dead. Ainu’s unique inner world will be introduced with a touch of the level of person narrative, dreams, tales, and faiths.