The Noboribetsu Library

After lunch, Seino-san brought me to the Noboribetsu library so that I could look at their collection of books on Northern Peoples. He had prepared some books for me, upon my email request, before I got there (mostly about local area geography and its relationship with the Ainu of Noboribetsu), which proved very interesting and I had been reading them at my leisure in the hotel room since the night before. But I did find two books written in English that I added to my stack of reading materials – one being the landmark Ainu study by John Batchelor, an English missionary who lived among the Ainu people and was one of the first to publish about their language (including an Ainu-Japanese-English Dictionary) and culture. The other was a collection of Ainu legends that I read mostly for pleasure but also to gain a greater sense of the general structure and moral teachings of Ainu stories.