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Updated: June 17, 2025
In structure the resemblances which the Aino presents to Japanese are outweighed by the differences; and, though it may ultimately prove to fall into a north-east Asiatic group of languages, this is so far from being made out that it is safest for the present to treat both race and language as isolated.
And as the relics of the bear may not enter the house by the door, and Aino houses in Saghalien have no windows, a man gets up on the roof and lets the flesh, the head, and the skin down through the smoke-hole. Rice and wild potatoes are then offered to the head, and a pipe, tobacco, and matches are considerately placed beside it.
Indeed our principal authority on Aino religion, the Rev. John Batchelor, frankly describes as worship the ceremonious respect which the Aino pay to the bear, and he affirms that the animal is undoubtedly one of their gods.
If the view of recent students of anthropology be correct, that the elements dominating the population in ancient Japan were in the south, Malay; in the north, Aino; and in the central region, or that occupied by the Yamato men, Korean; then, these continental invaders may have been worshippers of Heaven and have possessed a religion closely akin to that of ancient China with its monotheism.
This principle perhaps explains the attitude, at first sight puzzling and contradictory, of the Aino towards the bear. The flesh and skin of the bear regularly afford them food and clothing; but since the bear is an intelligent and powerful animal, it is necessary to offer some satisfaction or atonement to the bear species for the loss which it sustains in the death of so many of its members.
His works, The Classical Poetry of the Japanese, his various grammars and hand-books for the acquisition of the language, his Hand-book for Japan, his Aino Studies, Things Japanese, papers in the T.A.S.J. and his translation of the Kojiki are all of a high order of value. It was published in Yedo in 1856, while Japan was still excited over the visits of the American and European fleets.
If a hawk is well treated in captivity and prayed to after this fashion when he is about to be killed, he will surely send help to the hunter. Thus the Aino hopes to profit in various ways by slaughtering the creatures, which, nevertheless, he treats as divine.
Others, if interpreted as Japanese, have a far-fetched sense, as, for instance, the villages of Mennai and Tonami, which, if treated as Japanese, would signify "inside permission" and "hares in a row"; whereas, if taken to be originally Aino they may bear the reasonable sense of "bad stream" and "stream from the lake."
Of course all this has suggested a theory of the Ainos belonging to the Aryan race; and, although the idea comes to nothing when examined strictly, its existence is an acknowledgment of the special Aino race-type. Mention must also be made of an anatomical peculiarity of the Aino skeleton, consisting of a remarkable flattening of the arm-and leg-bones.
Aino mothers, lulling their babies to sleep, as they rock them in the cradle hung over the kitchen fire, use words, touch on subjects which we never mention; and that precisely is a noteworthy characteristic. The innocent savage is not found in Aino-land, if indeed he is to be found anywhere. The Aino's imagination is as prurient as that of any Zola, and far more outspoken.
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