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Even in religion, the most conservative of all institutions, especially among barbarians, the Ainos have suffered Japanese influence to intrude itself. It is Japanese rice-beer, under its Japanese name of sake, which they offer in libations to their gods. Their very word for "prayer" seems to be archaic Japanese.
A whole month at Hakodate was spoilt in this way, and nothing obtained from an Aino named Tomtare, who had been procured for me by the kindness of H. E. the Governor of Hakodate. One can have intercourse with men who smell badly, and who suffer, as almost all Ainos do, from lice and from a variety of disgusting skin-diseases. It is a mere question of endurance and of disinfectants.
General Faidherbe discovered at Roknia, in Algeria, two trepanned skulls, dating from a remote antiquity, in one of which the wound is half an inch in diameter, and shows no sign of cicatrization; and travellers speak of evident traces of similar operations on skulls dating from the time of the Ainos;, the ancestors or predecessors of the Japanese at the present day; and if we cross the Atlantic, we shall meet with instances of trepanations executed in a similar manner, and probably for similar reasons.
Still northward roamed the Ainos, a race whose ancestral seats may have been in far-off Dravidian India. Despite the constant conflicts between the Yamato people who had agriculture and the beginnings of government, law and literature, and their less civilized neighbors, the tendency to amalgamation was already strong.
Roughly outlining the ethnology of Japan, we should say that the aborigines were immigrants from the continent with Malay reinforcement in the south, Koreans in the centre, and Ainos in the east and north, with occasional strains of blood at different periods from various parts of the Asian mainland. In brief, the Japanese are a very mixed race.
The occasional considerable development of the hair is an indication pointing to such an origin. This applies not only to individuals, but to tribes or races, as in the instances of the Ainos of Japan and some of the Pygmies of Africa. The disappearance of the hair in man has been traced to no well established cause.
We have already alluded to Japan; for a long time the barbarian Ainos, the earliest inhabitants of the country, were acquainted with nothing but stone.
At the same time, the general tenour and tendency of the tales and traditions of the Ainos wear a widely different aspect from that which characterises the folk-lore of Japan. The Ainos, in their humble way, are addicted to moralising and to speculating on the origin of things.
Nevertheless, let it be said to the eternal honor of Shin Shu and of some of the minor sects, that they were always kind and helpful to the Eta. Furthermore it would be hard to discover Buddhist missionary activities among the Ainos, or benefits conferred upon them by the disciples of Gautama.
It was not inhabited by Ainos, but by Tartars, of which very decided proof was obtained a few days later. Kruzenstern next entered the channel separating Saghalien from Tartary, but he was hardly six miles from the middle of the passage when his soundings gave six fathoms only. It was useless to hope to penetrate further.
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