Born and raised in Hokkaido, I was accustomed to seeing wooden carved bears. I depicted a wild Ezo (Hokkaido) brown bear in Shiretoko preying on Sakhalin (Karafuto) trout as they move north up the river during spawning season to hibernate. One of the treasures of the entire Hokkaido region is the Ainu pattern, which has been selected as a Hokkaido Heritage Site. There is a prevailing theory that the patterns, which have been passed down from generation to generation, have the meaning of "repelling evil spirits. For example, the design on clothing is said to have been taken from a spider's web to prevent evil spirits from entering through the collar, hem, and back of the garment. Ainu is an Ainu word meaning "human," and is said to have originally meant "human" as a concept in contrast to "kamui," a term referring to nature based on the spirit that all things in nature have a heart. The Ainu people are known as the indigenous people of the Ainu moshiri (the land where humans live), a wide area extending from the northern Tohoku region to Hokkaido (Ezo-gashima), Sakhalin (Sakhalin), and the Kuril Islands in the roughly 17th to 19th centuries. The Ainu pattern is applied to the Yezo brown bear, which hunts trout moving north in the river, and the trout fish, feeling their lives in danger, drop the eggs they carry in their bellies into the river to keep their lives alive. The image represents the coexistence and co-prosperity of people's lives and the animals and fish that survive in the natural world.
