Ikuo Oshima was born a little outside of Tokyo, Japan, in 1947, but has lived in the worlds northernmost settlement, Siorapaluk, in Greenland since 1974. At the end of the Sixties, he studied industrial technology at the University of Tokyo and witnessed the first baby steps toward the development of the computer.

He did not feel he fit into the pattern of Japanese culture and was dismayed at the thought of a lifetime job. He wanted to see and experience other cultures and was an active member of the universitys mountain-climbing club.

A culture shock
He came to Siorapaluk for the first time in 1972 and it was a culture shock. He observed the Eskimo ways of integrating with nature and discovered that even the children could teach him things. He had to forget everything he had learned in the mountain-climbing club in Tokyo and start from the beginning. He moved into a shed without electricity, heated by coal, where you melted snow and ice for water. He did not speak a word of the native tongue, but the children of the settlement came to his shed and, through them, he acquired the language. And he discovered that he thrived on the primitive life of a hunting society. In particular: he loved hunting!

In 1973, he had to go back to Japan.
The year after, he was hired by Japanese television to do a program on the migration of the Eskimos. During the winter of 1974, together with 5-6 local hunters from Siorapaluk, he went on a two and a half month journey by sled across the ice from Greenland to Canada and back again with a Japanese television crew.
When the trip was over and the television crew had gone home, Ikuo made a difficult decision and stayed. As the eldest, he was obligated to take care of his parents in their old age, but they commended his decision.

He married a Greenlander named Anna and had to learn the art of hunting from the bottom up to put food on the family table. When they had their third child in 1979, he felt he was on the verge of mastering his craft, but it was not until around 1983, when Anna gave birth to their fifth and last child, Aya, that he felt he had served out his apprenticeship. But it had also taken 10 years.

He does not try to conceal how hard it has been.
Whether it has been worth the price is a much more difficult question. However, upon reflection, Ikuo says that a hard life is the price he had to pay to be able to hunt.
He is a well-respected hunter in Greenland but considers himself fair to middling. Youll never be thought of as a great hunter, he says, if you like to hunt small animals.

A slipped disc cost him his savings, when he was unable to hunt for two years at the beginning of the 1990s and the authorities refused to acknowledge his injury as work-related. He was close to giving up and began to experiment with tanning hides.
From an economic perspective, it is generally bad business to be a hunter.
Earnings seldom match the effort, and Ikuo is afraid he belongs to the last generation of fulltime hunters in Siorapaluk.
He admits that he is not always rational. Once, the ice broke up and his dogs were trapped on an ice floe, which was about to drift out to sea. It was winter and getting dark and, despite the fact that he had brought himself to safety on the ice, he could not leave his dogs in the lurch. After all, he was the one who had put them into that situation, as he says. So, Ikuo jumped back after the dogs and drifted out to sea with them. He had no radio and nowhere was it written down where other hunters from Siorapaluk might find him. By a lucky coincidence, they found him in the winter darkness, after he had drifted for 11 hours, and brought both him and his dogs to shore.

The only thing he misses from his homeland is the mountains. But he dreams of them every so often, when the wind or the snow keeps him in his tent for days at a time in desolate regions. He is not religious in the traditional sense, but he feels that nature itself is a beautiful religion and, if he occasionally prays, it is a quiet prayer to nature to provide him with some of its bounty.