Archive Note
Among the Ainu, sinuye was women's tattooing, applied over time using soot gathered from burning birch bark, and the distinctive markings around the mouth and on the hands carried protective and spiritual meaning within Ainu belief. Observers documented the practice across northern Hokkaido and Sakhalin villages in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the English missionary John Batchelor recorded its cosmological significance in 1892. In 1871 the Kaitakushi, the Japanese government's Development Commission for Hokkaido, banned traditional tattooing as part of an assimilation campaign that labeled the markings uncivilized, and the 1899 Hokkaido Aborigine Protection Act deepened the suppression; some women in remote areas continued to receive the designs in secret, but the tradition had largely disappeared from public view by the early twentieth century. Since 2018 the Ainu artist Mayunkiki has researched sinuye, collected the memories of elders, and reproduced the patterns on her own face using temporary paint, bringing the tradition to a wider audience, including at the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, as part of a broader reclamation of Ainu cultural identity.