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TheKorpokkur (Ainu:コㇿポックㇽ;Japanese:コロポックル,romanized: Koropokkuru),[1] also writtenKoro-pok-kuru,[2]korobokkuru,korbokkur, orkoropokkur,[3]koro-pok-guru, are a race oflittle people in folklore of theAinu people of the northern Japanese islands.
The Ainu believe that thekorpokkur were the people who lived in the Ainu land before the Ainu themselves lived there. They were short of stature, agile, and skilled at fishing. They lived in pits with roofs made frombutterbur leaves. Long ago, thekorpokkur were on good terms with the Ainu, and would send them deer, fish, and other game and exchange goods with them. The little people hated to be seen, however, so they would stealthily make their deliveries under the cover of night.
One day, a young Ainu man decided he wanted to see akorpokkur for himself, so he waited in ambush by the window where their gifts were usually left. When akorpokkur came to place something there, the young man grabbed it by the hand and dragged it inside. It turned out to be a beautifulkorpokkur woman, who was so enraged at the young man's rudeness that her people have not been seen since. Their pits, pottery, and stone implements, the Ainu believe, still remain scattered about the landscape.
The most common variations stem from the Japanese adaptation of Ainu words, which includes phonemes not present in Japanese. In a completely different context,koro is a noun, a shortened form ofkorokoni,[4][5] the Ainu word forfuki (Petasites japonicus). This abbreviation is likely what fed into the popular folk etymology of Koropokkuru as “people under the butterbur,” even though structurally, "kor" inkorpok‑un‑kur is part of a spatial compound. The original term can be reconstructed as "Korpok-un-kur". Respectively, "pok" = down; below, "un" = locative particle, "kur" (alternatively "kuru" or "guru") = person; man. "Korpok" (alternatively "corpok" or "choropok") is a compound that means "beneath, underground". Examples of Ainu words using such components include:
Some anthropologists of the 19th and 20th centuries believed that thekorpokkur were in fact a "race that predated the Ainu".Arnold Henry Savage Landor proposed a theory about the indigenous people ofHokkaido, which suggested that the Ainu, migrating from the north, overtook and displaced an earlier population known as the Koro-pok-kuru. He believed the Koro-pok-kuru shared similarities with theEskimo people and may have arrived in Yezo from theAleutian Islands.[6][7] Allen P. McCartney equated theOkhotsk culture with theKorpokkur.[8] Early ethnographer Tsuboi Shogoro believed the Koropok-Guru legends pointed to a previous population that the Ainu displaced or even eradicated.[9][10] These conclusions mostly come from misinterpretations of Hokkaido Jomon artifacts (such as pottery, tools, and arrowheads), which were understudied at the time and markedly different from what contemporaneous Ainu used.
Alexander Akulov[11] refutes early anthropologists, stating that the pit-dwellings supposedly associated with the pre-Ainu aboriginal people were also built by the Ainu themselves in theKurils andSakhalin, an argument also used byJohn Batchelor.[5] Based on the evidence presented, Akulov concludes that the Koropok-Guru legend is nothing more than a story. It does not signify a mysterious pre-Ainu race, but rather reflects a traditional Ainu dwelling practice that predates significant Japanese influence. He cites Pozdneyev, arguing that the legend "was spread there where Ainu were already more or less japanized", quoting:
Further northward the legend has terminated, in the northern Kuril Islands there nobody knows anything about it, and Ainu of Northern Kurils not only tell that the islands were not inhabited by someone else but insisted that they had lived in these islands since very deep antiquity. Being interrogated about the remains of the Stone Age they confidently responded that these remains belong to their ancestors.[12]
In hisAinu–English–Japanese Dictionary, John Batchelor says that certain pit-dwellings associated with thekorpokkur were called "Koropok-un-guru koro chisei kot" or "Toi chisei kotcha utara kot chisei kot", respectively meaning "sites belonging to people who dwelt below ground" and "house sites of people who had earth houses." He arguments that the original meaning ofKoropok-guru was not "people of the Petasites plant", sinceKoropok can only be translated as “under, beneath, below.” The full name would beKoropok-un-guru, “people dwelling below,”un being a locative particle, which doesn't carry the idea of dwarves or little people. He further argues that, even if "Koropok-guru" literally meant "people under the Petasites" plant, it wouldn't imply dwarfish stature. Batchelor himself, standing nearly 5 ft. 8 in., could comfortably walk and even ride a pony amongst the Petasites leaves. He found it humorous to imagine how tall the people who named the pit-dwellers "dwarves" must have been if they considered movement beneath the plant indicative of short stature.[5]