Chiyo Nakamura

Evacuation to Hokkaido

In August 1945, when Chiyo was about 39 years old, the Soviet Union invaded Karafuto and quickly conquered it. Between 1946 and 1948, Japanese inhabitants of Sakhalin (including Japanized indigenous people) who had not already been evacuated during World War II were deported to Japan under an agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States.

In 1947, Chiyo and her family, including two of her children, relocated from Otasu in Sakhalin to Hokkaido. First, they lived in Iwanai for about two years; then they moved to Abashiri, where several other Nivkh and Orok families also settled. (By 2004, the Nivkh-Orok community in Abashiri had vanished.) Preserved at the Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples are photos of Chiyo's performances, along with her three wooden idols, shaman's belt, rattle, and tambourine beater. Her other artifacts, including handmade traditional fur clothing, have been displayed at the Hokkaido University Botanical Gardens Museum and at the Hokkaido Island Historical Museum. posthumously published, which she dictated to Robert Austerlitz between 1956 and 1958. Her other dictations published in 1992 include "The Cowardly Santan," "Old Ainu Stories," two stories about an Ainu fox, "The Alcohol-Loving Ainu God," two stories about the Orok, and two stories about war between the Ainu and Orok.