ABSTRACT
On a winter's afternoon in 1994 one of the editors found himself sitting in a public hall in a provincial town in Hokkaido watching a skit being performed, in modern Ainu language, by several children and adults. A phrase ran through his mind: 'I decline to accept the end of Ainu.' Later he realised that he was thinking of William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech in which he said, 'I decline to accept the end of Man . . . I believe that Man will not only endure; He will prevail.' The irony is that the novelist could also have been talking about Ainu as the word Ainu is often translated into English as 'Man' or 'people'.
