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Updated: May 17, 2025
When the mirth was at its height two young Aino, who had let the bear out of his cage, mounted the roof of the hut and threw cakes of millet among the company, who all scrambled for them without distinction of age or sex. The bear was next skinned and disembowelled, and the trunk severed from the head, to which the skin was left hanging. The blood, caught in cups, was eagerly swallowed by the men.
These, once the old kami of the primitive Japanese, or kamui of the aboriginal Aino, show the mental soil and climate which were to condition the growth of the seed imported from other lands, whether of Buddhism or Christianity. It is very hard to kill a god while the old mind that grew and nourished him still remains the same.
Thus the Aino agree with the Druids in regarding mistletoe as a cure for almost every disease, and they agree with the ancient Italians that applied to women it helps them to bear children. Again, the Druidical notion that the mistletoe was an "all-healer" or panacea may be compared with a notion entertained by the Walos of Senegambia.
The women are sufficiently ugly; their colour, which is equally dark, their coal black hair combed over their faces, blue painted lips, and tattooed hands, added to no remarkable cleanliness in their clothing, do not give them any great pretensions to loveliness.... However, I must do them the justice to say, that they are modest in the highest degree, and in this point form the completest contrast with the women of Nukahiva and of Otaheite.... The characteristic quality of an Aino is goodness of heart, which is expressed in the strongest manner in his countenance; and so far as we were enabled to observe their actions, they fully answered this expression.... The dress of the Ainos consists chiefly of the skins of tame dogs and seals; but I have seen some in a very different attire, which resembled the Parkis of the Kamtschadales, and is, properly speaking a white shirt worn over their other clothes.
In ancient days, an Aino chieftain of Iwanai went to sea in order to catch sea-lions, taking with him his two sons. They speared a sea-lion, which, however, swam off with the spear sticking in its body. Meanwhile a gale began to blow down from the mountains. The men cut the rope which was fast to the spear. Then their boat floated on. After some time, they reached a beautiful land.
Three generations before my time there lived an Aino who wished to find out whether the stories told about the existence of an under-world were true. All was dark in front, all was dark behind. But at last there was a glimmer of light a-head. The man went on, and soon emerged into Hades. There were trees, and villages, and rivers, and the sea, and large junks loading fish and seaweed.
It being now spring, and there being something peculiar to this country of mine you shall be taken care of in my house until the autumn; and in the winter you shall become our husbands. The following spring I will send you home. So now do you bear me to my house." Thereupon the Aino chief and his sons bore the woman in the litter to the mountains. They saw that the country was all like moorland.
The bear is found in Yesso, and that animal has entered very largely into every phase of Aino life, somewhat circumscribed though this is. That animal was, or used to be, the objective point of Aino festivals, and seems, to some extent at any rate, to have had a part in their crude religious ideas.
When these tidings came to her mother the bitter tears poured from her eyes, and she sang, 'O all other mothers, listen: never try to force your daughters from the house they long to stay in, unto husbands whom they love not. Thus I drove away my daughter, Aino, fairest in the Northland.
Going on for a time, they came to the shore of Iwanai. Their wives were wearing widows' caps. So their husbands embraced them. So the story of woman-land was listened to carefully. All the Ainos saw the beautiful scabbard which the chief had used with that woman. xxxiv. The Worship of the Salmon, the Divine Fish. A certain Aino went out in a boat to catch fish in the sea.
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