Savage Life—A Forest Track—Cleanly Villages—A Hospitable Reception—The
Chief’s Mother—The Evening Meal—A Savage _Séance_—Libations to the
Gods—Nocturnal Silence—Aino Courtesy—The Chief’s Wife.
AINO HUT, BIRATORI, _August_ 23.
[Picture: Aino Houses]
I AM in the lonely Aino land, and I think that the most interesting of my
travelling experiences has been the living for three days and two nights
in an Aino hut, and seeing and sharing the daily life of complete
savages, who go on with their ordinary occupations just as if I were not
among them. I found yesterday a most fatiguing and over-exciting day, as
everything was new and interesting, even the extracting from men who have
few if any ideas in common with me all I could extract concerning their
religion and customs, and that through an interpreter. I got up at six
this morning to write out my notes, and have been writing for five hours,
and there is shortly the prospect of another savage _séance_. The
distractions, as you can imagine, are many. At this moment a savage is
taking a cup of _saké_ by the fire in the centre of the floor. He
salutes me by extending his hands and waving them towards his face, and
then dips a rod in the _saké_, and makes six libations to the god—an
upright piece of wood with a fringe of shavings planted in the floor of
the room. Then he waves the cup several times towards himself, makes
other libations to the fire, and drinks. Ten other men and women are
sitting along each side of the fire-hole, the chief’s wife is cooking,
the men are apathetically contemplating the preparation of their food;
and the other women, who are never idle, are splitting the bark of which
they make their clothes. I occupy the guest seat—a raised platform at
one end of the fire, with the skin of a black bear thrown over it.
[Picture: Ainos at Home. (From a Japanese Sketch)]
I have reserved all I have to say about the Ainos till I had been
actually among them, and I hope you will have patience to read to the
end. Ito is very greedy and self-indulgent, and whimpered very much
about coming to Biratori at all,—one would have thought he was going to
the stake. He actually borrowed for himself a sleeping mat and _futons_,
and has brought a chicken, onions, potatoes, French beans, Japanese
sauce, tea, rice, a kettle, a stew-pan, and a rice-pan, while I contented
myself with a cold fowl and potatoes.
We took three horses and a mounted Aino guide, and found a beaten track
the whole way. It turns into the forest at once on leaving Sarufuto, and
goes through forest the entire distance, with an abundance of reedy grass
higher than my hat on horseback along it, and, as it is only twelve
inches broad and much overgrown, the horses were constantly pushing
through leafage soaking from a night’s rain, and I was soon wet up to my
shoulders. The forest trees are almost solely the _Ailanthus
glandulosus_ and the _Zelkowa keaki_, often matted together with a
white-flowered trailer of the Hydrangea genus. The undergrowth is simply
hideous, consisting mainly of coarse reedy grass, monstrous docks, the
large-leaved _Polygonum cuspidatum_, several umbelliferous plants, and a
“ragweed” which, like most of its gawky fellows, grows from five to six
feet high. The forest is dark and very silent, threaded by this narrow
path, and by others as narrow, made by the hunters in search of game.
The “main road” sometimes plunges into deep bogs, at others is roughly
corduroyed by the roots of trees, and frequently hangs over the edge of
abrupt and much-worn declivities, in going up one of which the
baggage-horse rolled down a bank fully thirty feet high, and nearly all
the tea was lost. At another the guide’s pack-saddle lost its balance,
and man, horse, and saddle went over the slope, pots, pans, and packages
flying after them. At another time my horse sank up to his chest in a
very bad bog, and, as he was totally unable to extricate himself, I was
obliged to scramble upon his neck and jump to _terra firma_ over his
ears.
There is something very gloomy in the solitude of this silent land, with
its beast-haunted forests, its great patches of pasture, the resort of
wild animals which haunt the lower regions in search of food when the
snow drives them down from the mountains, and its narrow track,
indicating the single file in which the savages of the interior walk with
their bare, noiseless feet. Reaching the Sarufutogawa, a river with a
treacherous bottom, in which Mr. Von Siebold and his horse came to grief,
I hailed an Aino boy, who took me up the stream in a “dug-out,” and after
that we passed through Biroka, Saruba, and Mina, all purely Aino
villages, situated among small patches of millet, tobacco, and pumpkins,
so choked with weeds that it was doubtful whether they were crops. I was
much surprised with the extreme neatness and cleanliness outside the
houses; “model villages” they are in these respects, with no litter lying
in sight anywhere, nothing indeed but dog troughs, hollowed out of logs,
like “dug-outs,” for the numerous yellow dogs, which are a feature of
Aino life. There are neither puddles nor heaps, but the houses, all trim
and in good repair, rise clean out of the sandy soil.
Biratori, the largest of the Aino settlements in this region, is very
prettily situated among forests and mountains, on rising ground, with a
very sinuous river winding at its feet and a wooded height above. A
lonelier place could scarcely be found. As we passed among the houses
the yellow dogs barked, the women looked shy and smiled, and the men made
their graceful salutation. We stopped at the chief’s house, where, of
course, we were unexpected guests; but Shinondi, his nephew, and two
other men came out, saluted us, and with most hospitable intent helped
Ito to unload the horses. Indeed their eager hospitality created quite a
commotion, one running hither and the other thither in their anxiety to
welcome a stranger. It is a large house, the room being 35 by 25, and
the roof 20 feet high; but you enter by an ante-chamber, in which are
kept the millet-mill and other articles. There is a doorway in this, but
the inside is pretty dark, and Shinondi, taking my hand, raised the reed
curtain bound with hide, which concealed the entrance into the actual
house, and, leading me into it, retired a footstep, extended his arms,
waved his arms inwards three times, and then stroked his beard several
times, after which he indicated by a sweep of his hand and a beautiful
smile that the house and all it contained were mine. An aged woman, the
chief’s mother, who was splitting bark by the fire, waved her hands also.
She is the queen-regnant of the house.
[Picture: Aino Millet-Mill and Pestle]
Again taking my hand, Shinondi led me to the place of honour at the head
of the fire—a rude, movable platform six feet long by four broad, and a
foot high, on which he laid an ornamental mat, apologising for not having
at that moment a bearskin wherewith to cover it. The baggage was
speedily brought in by several willing pairs of hands; some reed mats
fifteen feet long were laid down upon the very coarse ones which covered
the whole floor, and when they saw Ito putting up my stretcher they hung
a fine mat along the rough wall to conceal it, and suspended another on
the beams of the roof for a canopy. The alacrity and instinctive
hospitality with which these men rushed about to make things comfortable
were very fascinating, though comfort is a word misapplied in an Aino
hut. The women only did what the men told them.
They offered food at once, but I told them that I had brought my own, and
would only ask leave to cook it on their fire. I need not have brought
any cups, for they have many lacquer bowls, and Shinondi brought me on a
lacquer tray a bowl full of water from one of their four wells. They
said that Benri, the chief, would wish me to make his house my own for as
long as I cared to stay, and I must excuse them in all things in which
their ways were different from my own. Shinondi and four others in the
village speak tolerable Japanese, and this of course is the medium of
communication. Ito has exerted himself nobly as an interpreter, and has
entered into my wishes with a cordiality and intelligence which have been
perfectly invaluable; and, though he did growl at Mr. Von Siebold’s
injunctions regarding politeness, he has carried them out to my
satisfaction, and even admits that the mountain Ainos are better than he
expected; “but,” he added “they have learned their politeness from the
Japanese!” They have never seen a foreign woman, and only three foreign
men, but there is neither crowding nor staring as among the Japanese,
possibly in part from apathy and want of intelligence. For three days
they have kept up their graceful and kindly hospitality, going on with
their ordinary life and occupations, and, though I have lived among them
in this room by day and night, there has been nothing which in any way
could offend the most fastidious sense of delicacy.
They said they would leave me to eat and rest, and all retired but the
chief’s mother, a weird, witch-like woman of eighty, with shocks of
yellow-white hair, and a stern suspiciousness in her wrinkled face. I
have come to feel as if she had the evil eye, as she sits there watching,
watching always, and for ever knotting the bark thread like one of the
Fates, keeping a jealous watch on her son’s two wives, and on other young
women who come in to weave—neither the dulness nor the repose of old age
about her; and her eyes gleam with a greedy light when she sees _saké_,
of which she drains a bowl without taking breath. She alone is
suspicious of strangers, and she thinks that my visit bodes no good to
her tribe. I see her eyes fixed upon me now, and they make me shudder.
I had a good meal seated in my chair on the top of the guest-seat to
avoid the fleas, which are truly legion. At dusk Shinondi returned, and
soon people began to drop in, till eighteen were assembled, including the
sub-chief and several very grand-looking old men, with full, grey, wavy
beards. Age is held in much reverence, and it is etiquette for these old
men to do honour to a guest in the chief’s absence. As each entered he
saluted me several times, and after sitting down turned towards me and
saluted again, going through the same ceremony with every other person.
They said they had come “to bid me welcome.” They took their places in
rigid order at each side of the fireplace, which is six feet long,
Benri’s mother in the place of honour at the right, then Shinondi, then
the sub-chief, and on the other side the old men. Besides these, seven
women sat in a row in the background splitting bark. A large iron pan
hung over the fire from a blackened arrangement above, and Benri’s
principal wife cut wild roots, green beans, and seaweed, and shred dried
fish and venison among them, adding millet, water, and some
strong-smelling fish-oil, and set the whole on to stew for three hours,
stirring the “mess” now and then with a wooden spoon.
Several of the older people smoke, and I handed round some mild tobacco,
which they received with waving hands. I told them that I came from a
land in the sea, very far away, where they saw the sun go down—so very
far away that a horse would have to gallop day and night for five weeks
to reach it—and that I had come a long journey to see them, and that I
wanted to ask them many questions, so that when I went home I might tell
my own people something about them. Shinondi and another man, who
understood Japanese, bowed, and (as on every occasion) translated what I
said into Aino for the venerable group opposite. Shinondi then said
“that he and Shinrichi, the other Japanese speaker, would tell me all
they knew, but they were but young men, and only knew what was told to
them. They would speak what they believed to be true, but the chief knew
more than they, and when he came back he might tell me differently, and
then I should think that they had spoken lies.” I said that no one who
looked into their faces could think that they ever told lies. They were
very much pleased, and waved their hands and stroked their beards
repeatedly. Before they told me anything they begged and prayed that I
would not inform the Japanese Government that they had told me of their
customs, or harm might come to them!
For the next two hours, and for two more after supper, I asked them
questions concerning their religion and customs, and again yesterday for
a considerable time, and this morning, after Benri’s return, I went over
the same subjects with him, and have also employed a considerable time in
getting about 300 words from them, which I have spelt phonetically of
course, and intend to go over again when I visit the coast Ainos. {241}
The process was slow, as both question and answer had to pass through
three languages. There was a very manifest desire to tell the truth, and
I think that their statements concerning their few and simple customs may
be relied upon. I shall give what they told me separately when I have
time to write out my notes in an orderly manner. I can only say that I
have seldom spent a more interesting evening.
About nine the stew was ready, and the women ladled it into lacquer bowls
with wooden spoons. The men were served first, but all ate together.
Afterwards _saké_, their curse, was poured into lacquer bowls, and across
each bowl a finely-carved “saké-_stick_” was laid. These sticks are very
highly prized. The bowls were waved several times with an inward motion,
then each man took his stick and, dipping it into the _saké_, made six
libations to the fire and several to the “god”—a wooden post, with a
quantity of spiral white shavings falling from near the top. The Ainos
are not affected by _saké_ nearly so easily as the Japanese. They took
it cold, it is true, but each drank about three times as much as would
have made a Japanese foolish, and it had no effect upon them. After two
hours more talk one after another got up and went out, making profuse
salutations to me and to the others. My candles had been forgotten, and
our _séance_ was held by the fitful light of the big logs on the fire,
aided by a succession of chips of birch bark, with which a woman
replenished a cleft stick that was stuck into the fire-hole. I never saw
such a strangely picturesque sight as that group of magnificent savages
with the fitful firelight on their faces, and for adjuncts the flare of
the torch, the strong lights, the blackness of the recesses of the room
and of the roof, at one end of which the stars looked in, and the row of
savage women in the background—eastern savagery and western civilisation
met in this hut, savagery giving and civilisation receiving, the
yellow-skinned Ito the connecting-link between the two, and the
representative of a civilisation to which our own is but an “infant of
days.”
I found it very exciting, and when all had left crept out into the
starlight. The lodges were all dark and silent, and the dogs, mild like
their masters, took no notice of me. The only sound was the rustle of a
light breeze through the surrounding forest. The verse came into my
mind, “It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of
these little ones should perish.” Surely these simple savages are
children, as children to be judged; may we not hope as children to be
saved through Him who came “not to judge the world, but to save the
world”?
I crept back again and into my mosquito net, and suffered not from fleas
or mosquitoes, but from severe cold. Shinondi conversed with Ito for
some time in a low musical voice, having previously asked if it would
keep me from sleeping. No Japanese ever intermitted his ceaseless
chatter at any hour of the night for a similar reason. Later, the
chief’s principal wife, Noma, stuck a triply-cleft stick in the
fire-hole, put a potsherd with a wick and some fish-oil upon it, and by
the dim light of this rude lamp sewed until midnight at a garment of bark
cloth which she was ornamenting for her lord with strips of blue cloth,
and when I opened my eyes the next morning she was at the window sewing
by the earliest daylight. She is the most intelligent-looking of all the
women, but looks sad and almost stern, and speaks seldom. Although she
is the principal wife of the chief she is not happy, for she is
childless, and I thought that her sad look darkened into something evil
as the other wife caressed a fine baby boy. Benri seems to me something
of a brute, and the mother-in-law obviously holds the reins of government
pretty tight. After sewing till midnight she swept the mats with a bunch
of twigs, and then crept into her bed behind a hanging mat. For a moment
in the stillness I felt a feeling of panic, as if I were incurring a risk
by being alone among savages, but I conquered it, and, after watching the
fire till it went out, fell asleep till I was awoke by the severe cold of
the next day’s dawn.