The chief interest of the average casual visitor to Japan’s north island
is, no doubt, in the remnants of its primitive people, the “hairy Ainu.”
A cluster of them dwell in the outskirts of Asahigawa; there are
scattered Ainu villages along the farther reaches of the Hokkaido coast,
and here and there in the forested mountains. Subservient now to their
conquerors as are our own Indians, their customs and even their language
have taken on many things from the Japanese. In theory the mikado’s
Government acts the rôle of altruistic guardian over the scanty twenty
thousand of these aborigines which its records claim still survive, in
Yezo, in the scattered Kuriles, and in the Japanese half of the once
Russian island of Karafuto, or Saghalien, still farther north. There are
no cases listed, however, of these helpless wards’ amassing pianos and
automobiles from natural resources discovered on their reservations.
Driven, if admittedly faulty historical records be accepted as veracious
evidence, from their once solid foothold on the main island of Japan to
the nooks and crannies of its frigid neighbors during the more than
twenty-five centuries since their slant-eyed foes came upon them from
somewhere to the south, the Ainus have lost completely their former
rugged power of physical resistance to such aggression.
[Illustration: A typical Ainu hut—and kodak-shy Ainu children scrambling
for coppers]
[Illustration: In the American-like north island of Japan a Shinto
shrine or a Buddhist temple here and there is almost the only touch of
Oriental architecture]
[Illustration: An Ainu working in his front garden]
[Illustration: Ainus mending their fishing utensils]
The experienced traveler gradually learns that outward appearances are
often deceitful; hence there is perhaps no proof of anything in the fact
that the Ainu, even the defeated dregs of the race which survive to-day,
are much handsomer specimens of the human family, at least to Western
eyes, than their conquerors. The women, to be sure, are mainly
slatterns, as is so often the case among primitive peoples, particularly
those under the domination of what we fondly call civilization. But it
was hard to realize that these sturdy, upstanding men, not merely more
powerful but far more comely than the average Japanese, are little more
than children in intellect. What seems to have been a sincere effort to
educate a picked group of Ainu youths in Tokyo ended with an even more
sudden relapse into savagery than was ever the case with our
Indian-school graduates.
Such Ainu villages as I visited were outwardly distinguished mainly by
the superimposed layers, like incredibly thick rows of shingles, of the
thatch covering their roofs; that and earth floors, rubbish heaps, and a
generally un-Japanese shiftlessness. Their clothing has almost
completely succumbed to Japanese, or Japanese-Western, influence, even
to the greater or less absence thereof on what, to Occidental races,
would be embarrassing occasions. The features are blunt, the nose almost
as negroid as that of lower-class Nipponese, but the eyes are unslanted
and full-lidded, quite as we of the West expect eyes to be. As to their
far-famed “hairiness,” the older men, to be sure, have patriarchal
beards—the younger, disliking perhaps the notoriety which this feature
has brought upon the race, are commonly smooth-shaven—and their sturdy
bare arms and legs are generously adorned with black hair. But I have
seen as goodly displays in American gymnasiums, and it is mainly their
contrast to the effeminate-skinned Japanese that has given them their
reputation for undue hirsute adornment. The children of Japan, in fact,
and even uncultivated adults in their naughty moods, often greet any
visitor of Caucasian race with the contemptuous term “_keto-jin_,” or
“hairy foreigner.”
It is not the beards of the men but the magnificent mustaches of the
women that will surprise the average traveler. It has long been the Ainu
custom, now somewhat dying out, to begin decorating early in life the
upper lip of the girls with a crude tattooing of what seems to be
kitchen soot, treated later with some native concoction which gives it a
bluish tint, so that by the time her early marriage-day comes the maid
is adorned with a blue mustache having the flourishing upturned ends
cultivated by the Italian dandy and giving her a dashing air somewhat
out of keeping with her sex and the life of drudgery before her. Other
decorations of a similar nature are now and then perpetrated on other
parts of the body, notably a miniature Vandyke on the lower lip. While
the custom may be merely fantastic in youth, it becomes hideous in old
age. Like the young men, the women who have not yet outlived the sense
of shame seem to resent this most notorious of their features and can
with difficulty be induced to withdraw a corner of a garment from across
their mouths when facing a stranger or a camera.
The Ainus live mainly by fishing and hunting and are noted for their
valiancy, particularly for the feat of killing the savage brown bear of
Yezo with a knife, or with bow and arrows. Crude sledges, scarcely large
enough for half-grown children, leaning against their huts indicate that
they are not house-bound during the long rigorous winters. Some of the
chiefs who can afford it are said still to indulge in polygamy; the race
has plainly a greater dread of soap and water than of fleas and ancient,
fishy smells; the Ainu’s greatest desire in life is reputed to be a
copious supply of Japanese _sake_, a craving which their
self-constituted guardians make no frantic efforts to curb.
I might still have departed from Hokkaido with a lingering doubt of the
inherent savagery of the Ainu in spite of the wide-spread testimony to
the contrary, but for my last encounter with him. I had been sauntering
for an hour or two about one of his villages, stalking for
photographs—for a mixture of superstition and childish cupidity
engendered by hurried, kodak-armed tourists has made the tribe somewhat
camera-shy. A magnificent specimen of fully adult and hirsute manhood
was almost on the point of falling into my trap when a sound between a
grunt and a shriek from a rather surly boy whom I had not been able to
shake off caused me to glance around. Down one of the sandy lanes
serving as streets came striding the village chief—for such I had found
him to be shortly after pilfering his likeness by a simple ruse. Having
this already, I had no special interest in watching his approach, and
turned back to my still uncaptured quarry. Suddenly I beheld the chief,
physically a mighty man still for all his huge bush of almost snow-white
hair and beard, scowling upon me with his broad nose all but touching my
face and his liquid black eyes blazing. Exactly what was the cause of
his quite evident displeasure there was no means of knowing, for though
he was speaking voluminously in a voice which any orator might have
envied, it was not even in Japanese, and no stray word gave me an
inkling of the subject of his discourse.
All at once the notion seemed to strike him that I had no intention of
complying with his wishes, whatever they were. With a sudden short,
shrill scream which instantly betrayed the savage, he dashed off a few
paces and caught up the first manly weapon within reach, which chanced
to be nothing more or less than a complete wooden plow! Raising this
above his head in one powerful hand, he sprang toward me with a shriek
of uncontrolled anger and a contorted expression of rage such as no
doubt scores of the big brown bears of his native mountains had beheld
during the last moments of their existence.
The part of wisdom, of course, would have been frankly to take to my
heels. But there are few things more difficult for the average Caucasian
than openly to show fear of an opponent of an admittedly inferior race,
particularly when a score of persons of that race are peering out
through the doors and walls to behold his discomfiture. Moreover, I was
busily engaged in seeing that my kodak be returned to its case before
serious harm came to it. I stood where I was, therefore, instinctively
turning my back to catch the expected blow where it would do me the
least damage—and when I looked up again my howling savage was
brandishing the plow over my head, yet somehow hesitating to bring it
down upon me. The taming influence, no doubt, the forced repression of
centuries of stern Japanese rule, the ability to glimpse the
consequences, with which long generations of vicarious contact with the
ruthless justice of civilization had tinctured his savage soul, stayed
his hand. Denied the privilege of completely following his instinct, he
was helpless. From the roaring savage he became an angrily shrieking
child. The plow he still grasped in his mighty right hand, but its end
rested on the ground. With his left he caught the lapel of my coat in a
grip which mere yanking never would have loosened. But when I gave him
what school-boys of my day called the “thumbtwist,” he grunted with the
sudden, unexpected pain, released his hold, and, though still bellowing
in his magnificent oratorical voice, watched me walk away without
following.