Chapter VII

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.

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.