Letter 30
A Lady’s Toilet — Hair-dressing — Paint and Cosmetics — Afternoon Visitors — Christian Converts.
KUROISHI, August 5.
This is a pleasant place, and my room has many advantages besides light and cleanliness, as, for instance, that I overlook my neighbours and that I have seen a lady at her toilet preparing for a wedding! A married girl knelt in front of a black lacquer toilet-box with a spray of cherry blossoms in gold sprawling over it, and lacquer uprights at the top, which supported a polished metal mirror. Several drawers in the toilet-box were open, and toilet requisites in small lacquer boxes were lying on the floor. A female barber stood behind the lady, combing, dividing, and tying her hair, which, like that of all Japanese women, was glossy black, but neither fine nor long. The coiffure is an erection, a complete work of art. Two divisions, three inches apart, were made along the top of the head, and the lock of hair between these was combed, stiffened with a bandoline made from the Uvario Japonica, raised two inches from the forehead, turned back, tied, and pinned to the back hair. The rest was combed from each side to the back, and then tied loosely with twine made of paper. Several switches of false hair were then taken out of a long lacquer box, and, with the aid of a quantity of bandoline and a solid pad, the ordinary smooth chignon was produced, to which several loops and bows of hair were added, interwoven with a little dark-blue crepe, spangled with gold. A single, thick, square-sided, tortoiseshell pin was stuck through the whole as an ornament.
The fashions of dressing the hair are fixed. They vary with the ages of female children, and there is a slight difference between the coiffure of the married and unmarried. The two partings on the top of the head and the chignon never vary. The amount of stiffening used is necessary, as the head is never covered out of doors. This arrangement will last in good order for a week or more — thanks to the wooden pillow.
The barber’s work was only partially done when the hair was dressed, for every vestige of recalcitrant eyebrow was removed, and every downy hair which dared to display itself on the temples and neck was pulled out with tweezers. This removal of all short hair has a tendency to make even the natural hair look like a wig. Then the lady herself took a box of white powder, and laid it on her face, ears, and neck, till her skin looked like a mask. With a camel’s-hair brush she then applied some mixture to her eyelids to make the bright eyes look brighter, the teeth were blackened, or rather reblackened, with a feather brush dipped in a solution of gall-nuts and iron-filings — a tiresome and disgusting process, several times repeated, and then a patch of red was placed upon the lower lip. I cannot say that the effect was pleasing, but the girl thought so, for she turned her head so as to see the general effect in the mirror, smiled, and was satisfied. The remainder of her toilet, which altogether took over three hours, was performed in private, and when she reappeared she looked as if a very unmeaning-looking wooden doll had been dressed up with the exquisite good taste, harmony, and quietness which characterise the dress of Japanese women.
A most rigid social etiquette draws an impassable line of demarcation between the costume of the virtuous woman in every rank and that of her frail sister. The humiliating truth that many of our female fashions are originated by those whose position we the most regret, and are then carefully copied by all classes of women in our country, does not obtain credence among Japanese women, to whom even the slightest approximation in the style of hair-dressing, ornament, or fashion of garments would be a shame.
I was surprised to hear that three “Christian students” from Hirosaki wished to see me — three remarkably intelligent-looking, handsomely-dressed young men, who all spoke a little English. one of them had the brightest and most intellectual face which I have seen in Japan. They are of the samurai class, as I should have known from the superior type of face and manner. They said that they heard that an English lady was in the house, and asked me if I were a Christian, but apparently were not satisfied till, in answer to the question if I had a Bible, I was able to produce one.
Hirosaki is a castle town of some importance, 3.5 ri from here, and its ex-daimiyo supports a high-class school or college there, which has had two Americans successively for its headmasters. These gentlemen must have been very consistent in Christian living as well as energetic in Christian teaching, for under their auspices thirty young men have embraced Christianity. As all of these are well educated, and several are nearly ready to pass as teachers into Government employment, their acceptance of the “new way” may have an important bearing on the future of this region.
I. L. B.
Letter 31
A Travelling Curiosity — Rude Dwellings — Primitive Simplicity — The Public Bath-house.
KUROISHI.
Yesterday was beautiful, and, dispensing for the first time with Ito’s attendance, I took a kuruma for the day, and had a very pleasant excursion into a cul de sac in the mountains. The one drawback was the infamous road, which compelled me either to walk or be mercilessly jolted. The runner was a nice, kind, merry creature, quite delighted, Ito said, to have a chance of carrying so great a sight as a foreigner into a district in which no foreigner has even been seen. In the absolute security of Japanese travelling, which I have fully realised for a long time, I look back upon my fears at Kasukabe with a feeling of self-contempt.
The scenery, which was extremely pretty, gained everything from sunlight and colour — wonderful shades of cobalt and indigo, green blues and blue greens, and flashes of white foam in unsuspected rifts. It looked a simple, home-like region, a very pleasant land.
We passed through several villages of farmers who live in very primitive habitations, built of mud, looking as if the mud had been dabbed upon the framework with the hands. The walls sloped slightly inwards, the thatch was rude, the eaves were deep and covered all manner of lumber; there was a smoke-hole in a few, but the majority smoked all over like brick-kilns; they had no windows, and the walls and rafters were black and shiny. Fowls and horses live on one side of the dark interior, and the people on the other. The houses were alive with unclothed children, and as I repassed in the evening unclothed men and women, nude to their waists, were sitting outside their dwellings with the small fry, clothed only in amulets, about them, several big yellow dogs forming part of each family group, and the faces of dogs, children, and people were all placidly contented! These farmers owned many good horses, and their crops were splendid. Probably on matsuri days all appear in fine clothes taken from ample hoards. They cannot be so poor, as far as the necessaries of life are concerned; they are only very “far back.” They know nothing better, and are contented; but their houses are as bad as any that I have ever seen, and the simplicity of Eden is combined with an amount of dirt which makes me sceptical as to the performance of even weekly ablutions.
Upper Nakano is very beautiful, and in the autumn, when its myriads of star-leaved maples are scarlet and crimson, against a dark background of cryptomeria, among which a great white waterfall gleams like a snow-drift before it leaps into the black pool below, it must be well worth a long journey. I have not seen anything which has pleased me more. There is a fine flight of moss-grown stone steps down to the water, a pretty bridge, two superb stone torii, some handsome stone lanterns, and then a grand flight of steep stone steps up a hill-side dark with cryptomeria leads to a small Shinto shrine. Not far off there is a sacred tree, with the token of love and revenge upon it. The whole place is entrancing.
Lower Nakano, which I could only reach on foot, is only interesting as possessing some very hot springs, which are valuable in cases of rheumatism and sore eyes. It consists mainly of tea-houses and yadoyas, and seemed rather gay. It is built round the edge of an oblong depression, at the bottom of which the bath-houses stand, of which there are four, only nominally separated, and with but two entrances, which open directly upon the bathers. In the two end houses women and children were bathing in large tanks, and in the centre ones women and men were bathing together, but at opposite sides, with wooden ledges to sit upon all round. I followed the kuruma-runner blindly to the baths, and when once in I had to go out at the other side, being pressed upon by people from behind; but the bathers were too polite to take any notice of my most unwilling intrusion, and the kuruma-runner took me in without the slightest sense of impropriety in so doing. I noticed that formal politeness prevailed in the bath-house as elsewhere, and that dippers and towels were handed from one to another with profound bows. The public bath-house is said to be the place in which public opinion is formed, as it is with us in clubs and public-houses, and that the presence of women prevents any dangerous or seditious consequences; but the Government is doing its best to prevent promiscuous bathing; and, though the reform may travel slowly into these remote regions, it will doubtless arrive sooner or later. The public bath-house is one of the features of Japan.
I. L. B.
Letter 32
A Hard Day’s Journey — An Overturn — Nearing the Ocean — Joyful Excitement — Universal Greyness — Inopportune Policemen — A Stormy Voyage — A Wild Welcome — A Windy Landing — The Journey’s End.
HAKODATE, YEZO, August, 1878.
The journey from Kuroishi to Aomori, though only 22.5 miles, was a tremendous one, owing to the state of the roads; for more rain had fallen, and the passage of hundreds of pack-horses heavily loaded with salt-fish had turned the tracks into quagmires. At the end of the first stage the Transport Office declined to furnish a kuruma, owing to the state of the roads; but, as I was not well enough to ride farther, I bribed two men for a very moderate sum to take me to the coast; and by accommodating each other we got on tolerably, though I had to walk up all the hills and down many, to get out at every place where a little bridge had been carried away, that the kuruma might be lifted over the gap, and often to walk for 200 yards at a time, because it sank up to its axles in the quagmire. In spite of all precautions I was upset into a muddy ditch, with the kuruma on the top of me; but, as my air-pillow fortunately fell between the wheel and me, I escaped with nothing worse than having my clothes soaked with water and mud, which, as I had to keep them on all night, might have given me cold, but did not. We met strings of pack-horses the whole way, carrying salt-fish, which is taken throughout the interior.
The mountain-ridge, which runs throughout the Main Island, becomes depressed in the province of Nambu, but rises again into grand, abrupt hills at Aomori Bay. Between Kuroishi and Aomori, however, it is broken up into low ranges, scantily wooded, mainly with pine, scrub oak, and the dwarf bamboo. The Sesamum ignosco, of which the incense-sticks are made, covers some hills to the exclusion of all else. Rice grows in the valleys, but there is not much cultivation, and the country looks rough, cold, and hyperborean.
The farming hamlets grew worse and worse, with houses made roughly of mud, with holes scratched in the side for light to get in, or for smoke to get out, and the walls of some were only great pieces of bark and bundles of straw tied to the posts with straw ropes. The roofs were untidy, but this was often concealed by the profuse growth of the water-melons which trailed over them. The people were very dirty, but there was no appearance of special poverty, and a good deal of money must be made on the horses and mago required for the transit of fish from Yezo, and for rice to it.
At Namioka occurred the last of the very numerous ridges we have crossed since leaving Nikko at a point called Tsugarusaka, and from it looked over a rugged country upon a dark-grey sea, nearly landlocked by pine-clothed hills, of a rich purple indigo colour. The clouds were drifting, the colour was intensifying, the air was fresh and cold, the surrounding soil was peaty, the odours of pines were balsamic, it looked, felt, and smelt like home; the grey sea was Aomori Bay, beyond was the Tsugaru Strait — my long land-journey was done. A traveller said a steamer was sailing for Yezo at night, so, in a state of joyful excitement, I engaged four men, and by dragging, pushing, and lifting, they got me into Aomori, a town of grey houses, grey roofs, and grey stones on roofs, built on a beach of grey sand, round a grey bay — a miserable-looking place, though the capital of the ken.
It has a great export trade in cattle and rice to Yezo, besides being the outlet of an immense annual emigration from northern Japan to the Yezo fishery, and imports from Hakodate large quantities of fish, skins, and foreign merchandise. It has some trade in a pretty but not valuable “seaweed,” or variegated lacquer, called Aomori lacquer, but not actually made there, its own speciality being a sweetmeat made of beans and sugar. It has a deep and well-protected harbour, but no piers or conveniences for trade. It has barracks and the usual Government buildings, but there was no time to learn anything about it — only a short half-hour for getting my ticket at the Mitsu Bishi office, where they demanded and copied my passport; for snatching a morsel of fish at a restaurant where “foreign food” was represented by a very dirty table-cloth; and for running down to the grey beach, where I was carried into a large sampan crowded with Japanese steerage passengers.
The wind was rising, a considerable surf was running, the spray was flying over the boat, the steamer had her steam up, and was ringing and whistling impatiently, there was a scud of rain, and I was standing trying to keep my paper waterproof from being blown off, when three inopportune policemen jumped into the boat and demanded my passport. For a moment I wished them and the passport under the waves! The steamer is a little old paddle-boat of about 70 tons, with no accommodation but a single cabin on deck. She was as clean and trim as a yacht, and, like a yacht, totally unfit for bad weather. Her captain, engineers, and crew were all Japanese, and not a word of English was spoken. My clothes were very wet, and the night was colder than the day had been, but the captain kindly covered me up with several blankets on the floor, so I did not suffer. We sailed early in the evening, with a brisk northerly breeze, which chopped round to the south-east, and by eleven blew a gale; the sea ran high, the steamer laboured and shipped several heavy seas, much water entered the cabin, the captain came below every half-hour, tapped the barometer, sipped some tea, offered me a lump of sugar, and made a face and gesture indicative of bad weather, and we were buffeted about mercilessly till 4 a.m., when heavy rain came on, and the gale fell temporarily with it. The boat is not fit for a night passage, and always lies in port when bad weather is expected; and as this was said to be the severest gale which has swept the Tsugaru Strait since January, the captain was uneasy about her, but being so, showed as much calmness as if he had been a Briton!
The gale rose again after sunrise, and when, after doing sixty miles in fourteen hours, we reached the heads of Hakodate Harbour, it was blowing and pouring like a bad day in Argyllshire, the spin-drift was driving over the bay, the Yezo mountains loomed darkly and loftily through rain and mist, and wind and thunder, and “noises of the northern sea,” gave me a wild welcome to these northern shores. A rocky head like Gibraltar, a cold-blooded-looking grey town, straggling up a steep hillside, a few coniferae, a great many grey junks, a few steamers and vessels of foreign rig at anchor, a number of sampans riding the rough water easily, seen in flashes between gusts of rain and spin-drift, were all I saw, but somehow it all pleased me from its breezy, northern look.
The steamer was not expected in the gale, so no one met me, and I went ashore with fifty Japanese clustered on the top of a decked sampan in such a storm of wind and rain that it took us 1.5 hours to go half a mile; then I waited shelterless on the windy beach till the Customs’ Officers were roused from their late slumbers, and then battled with the storm for a mile up a steep hill. I was expected at the hospitable Consulate, but did not know it, and came here to the Church Mission House, to which Mr. and Mrs. Dening kindly invited me when I met them in Tokiyo. I was unfit to enter a civilised dwelling; my clothes, besides being soaked, were coated and splashed with mud up to the top of my hat; my gloves and boots were finished, my mud-splashed baggage was soaked with salt water; but I feel a somewhat legitimate triumph at having conquered all obstacles, and having accomplished more than I intended to accomplish when I left Yedo.
How musical the clamour of the northern ocean is! How inspiriting the shrieking and howling of the boisterous wind! Even the fierce pelting of the rain is home-like, and the cold in which one shivers is stimulating! You cannot imagine the delight of being in a room with a door that will lock, to be in a bed instead of on a stretcher, of finding twenty-three letters containing good news, and of being able to read them in warmth and quietness under the roof of an English home!
I. L. B.
Itinerary of Route from Niigata to Aomori
| No. of Houses. | Ri. | Cho. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kisaki | 56 | 4 | |
| Tsuiji | 209 | 6 | |
| Kurokawa | 215 | 2 | 12 |
| Hanadati | 20 | 2 | |
| Kawaguchi | 27 | 3 | |
| Numa | 24 | 1 | 18 |
| Tamagawa | 40 | 3 | |
| Okuni | 210 | 2 | 11 |
| Kurosawa | 17 | 1 | 18 |
| Ichinono | 20 | 1 | 18 |
| Shirokasawa | 42 | 1 | 21 |
| Tenoko | 120 | 3 | 11 |
| Komatsu | 513 | 2 | 13 |
| Akayu | 350 | 4 | |
| Kaminoyama | 650 | 5 | |
| Yamagata | 21,000 souls | 3 | 19 |
| Tendo | 1,040 | 3 | 8 |
| Tateoka | 307 | 3 | 21 |
| Tochiida | 217 | 1 | 33 |
| Obanasawa | 506 | 1 | 21 |
| Ashizawa | 70 | 1 | 21 |
| Shinjo | 1,060 | 4 | 6 |
| Kanayama | 165 | 3 | 27 |
| Nosoki | 37 | 3 | 9 |
| Innai | 257 | 3 | 12 |
| Yusawa | 1,506 | 3 | 35 |
| Yokote | 2,070 | 4 | 27 |
| Rokugo | 1,062 | 6 | |
| Shingoji | 209 | 1 | 28 |
| Kubota | 36,587 souls | 16 | |
| Minato | 2,108 | 1 | 28 |
| Carry forward | 107 | 21 |
About 368 miles.
| No. of Houses | Ri. | Cho. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brought forward | 107 | 21 | |
| Abukawa | 163 | 3 | 33 |
| Ichi Nichi Ichi | 306 | 1 | 34 |
| Kado | 151 | 2 | 9 |
| Hinikoyama | 396 | 2 | 9 |
| Tsugurata | 186 | 1 | 14 |
| Tubine | 153 | 1 | 18 |
| Kiriishi | 31 | 1 | 14 |
| Kotsunagi | 47 | 1 | 16 |
| Tsuguriko | 136 | 3 | 5 |
| Odate | 1,673 | 4 | 23 |
| Shirasawa | 71 | 2 | 19 |
| Ikarigaseki | 175 | 4 | 18 |
| Kuroishi | 1,176 | 6 | 19 |
| Daishaka | 43 | 4 | |
| Shinjo | 51 | 2 | 21 |
| Aomori | 1 | 24 | |
| Ri 153 | 9 |
This is considerably under the actual distance, as on several of the mountain routes the ri is 56 cho, but in the lack of accurate information the ri has been taken at its ordinary standard of 36 cho throughout.
Letter 33
Form and Colour — A Windy Capital — Eccentricities in House Roofs.
HAKODATE, YEZO, August 13, 1878
After a tremendous bluster for two days the weather has become beautifully fine, and I find the climate here more invigorating than that of the main island. It is Japan, but yet there is a difference somehow. When the mists lift they reveal not mountains smothered in greenery, but naked peaks, volcanoes only recently burnt out, with the red ash flaming under the noonday sun, and passing through shades of pink into violet at sundown. Strips of sand border the bay, ranges of hills, with here and there a patch of pine or scrub, fade into the far-off blue, and the great cloud shadows lie upon their scored sides in indigo and purple. Blue as the Adriatic are the waters of the land-locked bay, and the snowy sails of pale junks look whiter than snow against its intense azure. The abruptness of the double peaks behind the town is softened by a belt of cryptomeria, the sandy strip which connects the headland with the mainland heightens the general resemblance of the contour of the ground to Gibraltar; but while one dreams of the western world a kuruma passes one at a trot, temple drums are beaten in a manner which does not recall “the roll of the British drum,” a Buddhist funeral passes down the street, or a man-cart pulled and pushed by four yellow-skinned, little-clothed mannikins, creaks by, with the monotonous grunt of Ha huida.
A single look at Hakodate itself makes one feel that it is Japan all over. The streets are very wide and clean, but the houses are mean and low. The city looks as if it had just recovered from a conflagration. The houses are nothing but tinder. The grand tile roofs of some other cities are not to be seen. There is not an element of permanence in the wide, and windy streets. It is an increasing and busy place; it lies for two miles along the shore, and has climbed the hill till it can go no higher; but still houses and people look poor. It has a skeleton aspect too, which is partially due to the number of permanent “clothes-horses” on the roofs. Stones, however, are its prominent feature. Looking down upon it from above you see miles of grey boulders, and realise that every roof in the windy capital is “hodden doun” by a weight of paving stones. Nor is this all. Some of the flatter roofs are pebbled all over like a courtyard, and others, such as the roof of this house, for instance, are covered with sod and crops of grass, the two latter arrangements being precautions against risks from sparks during fires. These paving stones are certainly the cheapest possible mode of keeping the roofs on the houses in such a windy region, but they look odd.
None of the streets, except one high up the hill, with a row of fine temples and temple grounds, call for any notice. Nearly every house is a shop; most of the shops supply only the ordinary articles consumed by a large and poor population; either real or imitated foreign goods abound in Main Street, and the only novelties are the furs, skins, and horns, which abound in shops devoted to their sale. I covet the great bear furs and the deep cream-coloured furs of Aino dogs, which are cheap as well as handsome. There are many second-hand, or, as they are called, “curio” shops, and the cheap lacquer from Aomori is also tempting to a stranger.
I. L. B.
Letter 34
Ito’s Delinquency —“Missionary Manners”— A Predicted Failure.
HAKODATE, YEZO.
I am enjoying Hakodate so much that, though my tour is all planned and my arrangements are made, I linger on from day to day. There has been an unpleasant eclaircissement about Ito. You will remember that I engaged him without a character, and that he told both Lady Parkes and me that after I had done so his former master, Mr. Maries, asked him to go back to him, to which he had replied that he had “a contract with a lady.” Mr. Maries is here, and I now find that he had a contract with Ito, by which Ito bound himself to serve him as long as he required him, for $7 a month, but that, hearing that I offered $12, he ran away from him and entered my service with a lie! Mr. Maries has been put to the greatest inconvenience by his defection, and has been hindered greatly in completing his botanical collection, for Ito is very clever, and he had not only trained him to dry plants successfully, but he could trust him to go away for two or three days and collect seeds. I am very sorry about it. He says that Ito was a bad boy when he came to him, but he thinks that he cured him of some of his faults, and that he has served me faithfully. I have seen Mr. Maries at the Consul’s, and have arranged that, after my Yezo tour is over, Ito shall be returned to his rightful master, who will take him to China and Formosa for a year and a half, and who, I think, will look after his well-being in every way. Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn, who are here, heard a bad account of the boy after I began my travels and were uneasy about me, but, except for this original lie, I have no fault to find with him, and his Shinto creed has not taught him any better. When I paid him his wages this morning he asked me if I had any fault to find, and I told him of my objection to his manners, which he took in very good part and promised to amend them; “but,” he added, “mine are just missionary manners!”
Yesterday I dined at the Consulate, to meet Count Diesbach, of the French Legation, Mr. Von Siebold, of the Austrian Legation, and Lieutenant Kreitner, of the Austrian army, who start tomorrow on an exploring expedition in the interior, intending to cross the sources of the rivers which fall into the sea on the southern coast and measure the heights of some of the mountains. They are “well found” in food and claret, but take such a number of pack-ponies with them that I predict that they will fail, and that I, who have reduced my luggage to 45 lbs., will succeed!
I hope to start on my long-projected tour tomorrow; I have planned it for myself with the confidence of an experienced traveller, and look forward to it with great pleasure, as a visit to the aborigines is sure to be full of novel and interesting experiences. Good-bye for a long time.
I. L. B.
Letter 35 17
A Lovely Sunset — An Official Letter — A “Front Horse”— Japanese Courtesy — The Steam Ferry — Coolies Abscond — A Team of Savages — A Drove of Horses — Floral Beauties — An Unbeaten Track — A Ghostly Dwelling — Solitude and Eeriness.
GINSAINOMA, YEZO, August 17.
I am once again in the wilds! I am sitting outside an upper room built out almost over a lonely lake, with wooded points purpling and still shadows deepening in the sinking sun. A number of men are dragging down the nearest hillside the carcass of a bear which they have just despatched with spears. There is no village, and the busy clatter of the cicada and the rustle of the forest are the only sounds which float on the still evening air. The sunset colours are pink and green; on the tinted water lie the waxen cups of great water-lilies, and above the wooded heights the pointed, craggy, and altogether naked summit of the volcano of Komono-taki flushes red in the sunset. Not the least of the charms of the evening is that I am absolutely alone, having ridden the eighteen miles from Hakodate without Ito or an attendant of any kind; have unsaddled my own horse, and by means of much politeness and a dexterous use of Japanese substantives have secured a good room and supper of rice, eggs, and black beans for myself and a mash of beans for my horse, which, as it belongs to the Kaitakushi, and has the dignity of iron shoes, is entitled to special consideration!
I am not yet off the “beaten track,” but my spirits are rising with the fine weather, the drier atmosphere, and the freedom of Yezo. Yezo is to the main island of Japan what Tipperary is to an Englishman, Barra to a Scotchman, “away down in Texas” to a New Yorker — in the rough, little known, and thinly-peopled; and people can locate all sorts of improbable stories here without much fear of being found out, of which the Ainos and the misdeeds of the ponies furnish the staple, and the queer doings of men and dogs, and adventures with bears, wolves, and salmon, the embroidery. Nobody comes here without meeting with something queer, and one or two tumbles either with or from his horse. Very little is known of the interior except that it is covered with forest matted together by lianas, and with an undergrowth of scrub bamboo impenetrable except to the axe, varied by swamps equally impassable, which give rise to hundreds of rivers well stocked with fish. The glare of volcanoes is seen in different parts of the island. The forests are the hunting-grounds of the Ainos, who are complete savages in everything but their disposition, which is said to be so gentle and harmless that I may go among them with perfect safety.
Kindly interest has been excited by the first foray made by a lady into the country of the aborigines; and Mr. Eusden, the Consul, has worked upon the powers that be with such good effect that the Governor has granted me a shomon, a sort of official letter or certificate, giving me a right to obtain horses and coolies everywhere at the Government rate of 6 sen a ri, with a prior claim to accommodation at the houses kept up for officials on their circuits, and to help and assistance from officials generally; and the Governor has further telegraphed to the other side of Volcano Bay desiring the authorities to give me the use of the Government kuruma as long as I need it, and to detain the steamer to suit my convenience! With this document, which enables me to dispense with my passport, I shall find travelling very easy, and I am very grateful to the Consul for procuring it for me.
Here, where rice and tea have to be imported, there is a uniform charge at the yadoyas of 30 sen a day, which includes three meals, whether you eat them or not. Horses are abundant, but are small, and are not up to heavy weights. They are entirely unshod, and, though their hoofs are very shallow and grow into turned-up points and other singular shapes, they go over rough ground with facility at a scrambling run of over four miles an hour following a leader called a “front horse.” If you don’t get a “front horse” and try to ride in front, you find that your horse will not stir till he has another before him; and then you are perfectly helpless, as he follows the movements of his leader without any reference to your wishes. There are no mago; a man rides the “front horse” and goes at whatever pace you please, or, if you get a “front horse,” you may go without any one. Horses are cheap and abundant. They drive a number of them down from the hills every morning into corrals in the villages, and keep them there till they are wanted. Because they are so cheap they are very badly used. I have not seen one yet without a sore back, produced by the harsh pack-saddle rubbing up and down the spine, as the loaded animals are driven at a run. They are mostly very poor-looking.
As there was some difficulty about getting a horse for me the Consul sent one of the Kaitakushi saddle-horses, a handsome, lazy animal, which I rarely succeeded in stimulating into a heavy gallop. Leaving Ito to follow with the baggage, I enjoyed my solitary ride and the possibility of choosing my own pace very much, though the choice was only between a slow walk and the lumbering gallop aforesaid.
I met strings of horses loaded with deer hides, and overtook other strings loaded with sake and manufactured goods and in each case had a fight with my sociably inclined animal. In two villages I was interested to see that the small shops contained lucifer matches, cotton umbrellas, boots, brushes, clocks, slates, and pencils, engravings in frames, kerosene lamps, 18 and red and green blankets, all but the last, which are unmistakable British “shoddy,” being Japanese imitations of foreign manufactured goods, more or less cleverly executed. The road goes up hill for fifteen miles, and, after passing Nanai, a trim Europeanised village in the midst of fine crops, one of the places at which the Government is making acclimatisation and other agricultural experiments, it fairly enters the mountains, and from the top of a steep hill there is a glorious view of Hakodate Head, looking like an island in the deep blue sea, and from the top of a higher hill, looking northward, a magnificent view of the volcano with its bare, pink summit rising above three lovely lakes densely wooded. These are the flushed scaurs and outbreaks of bare rock for which I sighed amidst the smothering greenery of the main island, and the silver gleam of the lakes takes away the blindness from the face of nature. It was delicious to descend to the water’s edge in the dewy silence amidst balsamic odours, to find not a clattering grey village with its monotony, but a single, irregularly-built house, with lovely surroundings.
It is a most displeasing road for most of the way; sides with deep corrugations, and in the middle a high causeway of earth, whose height is being added to by hundreds of creels of earth brought on ponies’ backs. It is supposed that carriages and waggons will use this causeway, but a shying horse or a bad driver would overturn them. As it is at present the road is only passable for pack-horses, owing to the number of broken bridges. I passed strings of horses laden with sake going into the interior. The people of Yezo drink freely, and the poor Ainos outrageously. on the road I dismounted to rest myself by walking up hill, and, the saddle being loosely girthed, the gear behind it dragged it round and under the body of the horse, and it was too heavy for me to lift on his back again. When I had led him for some time two Japanese with a string of pack-horses loaded with deer-hides met me, and not only put the saddle on again, but held the stirrup while I remounted, and bowed politely when I went away. Who could help liking such a courteous and kindly people?
MORI, VOLCANO BAY, Monday.
Even Ginsainoma was not Paradise after dark, and I was actually driven to bed early by the number of mosquitoes. Ito is in an excellent humour on this tour. Like me, he likes the freedom of the Hokkaido. He is much more polite and agreeable also, and very proud of the Governor’s shomon, with which he swaggers into hotels and Transport Offices. I never get on so well as when he arranges for me. Saturday was grey and lifeless, and the ride of seven miles here along a sandy road through monotonous forest and swamp, with the volcano on one side and low wooded hills on the other, was wearisome and fatiguing. I saw five large snakes all in a heap, and a number more twisting through the grass. There are no villages, but several very poor tea-houses, and on the other side of the road long sheds with troughs hollowed like canoes out of the trunks of trees, containing horse food. Here nobody walks, and the men ride at a quick run, sitting on the tops of their pack-saddles with their legs crossed above their horses’ necks, and wearing large hats like coal-scuttle bonnets. The horses are infested with ticks, hundreds upon one animal sometimes, and occasionally they become so mad from the irritation that they throw themselves suddenly on the ground, and roll over load and rider. I saw this done twice. The ticks often transfer themselves to the riders.
Mori is a large, ramshackle village, near the southern point of Volcano Bay — a wild, dreary-looking place on a sandy shore, with a number of joroyas and disreputable characters. Several of the yadoyas are not respectable, but I rather like this one, and it has a very fine view of the volcano, which forms one point of the bay. Mori has no anchorage, though it has an unfinished pier 345 feet long. The steam ferry across the mouth of the bay is here, and there is a very difficult bridle-track running for nearly 100 miles round the bay besides, and a road into the interior. But it is a forlorn, decayed place. Last night the inn was very noisy, as some travellers in the next room to mine hired geishas, who played, sang, and danced till two in the morning, and the whole party imbibed sake freely. In this comparatively northern latitude the summer is already waning. The seeds of the blossoms which were in their glory when I arrived are ripe, and here and there a tinge of yellow on a hillside, or a scarlet spray of maple, heralds the glories and the coolness of autumn.
YUBETS. YEZO.
A loud yell of “steamer,” coupled with the information that “she could not wait one minute,” broke in upon go and everything else, and in a broiling sun we hurried down to the pier, and with a heap of Japanese, who filled two scows, were put on board a steamer not bigger than a large decked steam launch, where the natives were all packed into a covered hole, and I was conducted with much ceremony to the forecastle, a place at the bow 5 feet square, full of coils of rope, shut in, and left to solitude and dignity, and the stare of eight eyes, which perseveringly glowered through the windows! The steamer had been kept waiting for me on the other side for two days, to the infinite disgust of two foreigners, who wished to return to Hakodate, and to mine.
It was a splendid day, with foam crests on the wonderfully blue water, and the red ashes of the volcano, which forms the south point of the bay, glowed in the sunlight. This wretched steamer, whose boilers are so often “sick” that she can never be relied upon, is the only means of reaching the new capital without taking a most difficult and circuitous route. To continue the pier and put a capable good steamer on the ferry would be a useful expenditure of money. The breeze was strong and in our favour, but even with this it took us six weary hours to steam twenty-five miles, and it was eight at night before we reached the beautiful and almost land-locked bay of Mororan, with steep, wooded sides, and deep water close to the shore, deep enough for the foreign ships of war which occasionally anchor there, much to the detriment of the town. We got off in over-crowded sampans, and several people fell into the water, much to their own amusement. The servants from the different yadoyas go down to the jetty to “tout” for guests with large paper lanterns, and the effect of these, one above another, waving and undulating, with their soft coloured light, was as bewitching as the reflection of the stars in the motionless water. Mororan is a small town very picturesquely situated on the steep shore of a most lovely bay, with another height, richly wooded, above it, with shrines approached by flights of stone stairs, and behind this hill there is the first Aino village along this coast.
The long, irregular street is slightly picturesque, but I was impressed both with the unusual sight of loafers and with the dissolute look of the place, arising from the number of joroyas, and from the number of yadoyas that are also haunts of the vicious. I could only get a very small room in a very poor and dirty inn, but there were no mosquitoes, and I got a good meal of fish. on sending to order horses I found that everything was arranged for my journey. The Governor sent his card early, to know if there were anything I should like to see or do, but, as the morning was grey and threatening, I wished to push on, and at 9.30 I was in the kuruma at the inn door. I call it the kuruma because it is the only one, and is kept by the Government for the conveyance of hospital patients. I sat there uncomfortably and patiently for half an hour, my only amusement being the flirtations of Ito with a very pretty girl. Loiterers assembled, but no one came to draw the vehicle, and by degrees the dismal truth leaked out that the three coolies who had been impressed for the occasion had all absconded, and that four policemen were in search of them. I walked on in a dawdling way up the steep hill which leads from the town, met Mr. Akboshi, a pleasant young Japanese surveyor, who spoke English and stigmatised Mororan as “the worst place in Yezo;” and, after fuming for two hours at the waste of time, was overtaken by Ito with the horses, in a boiling rage. “They’re the worst and wickedest coolies in all Japan,” he stammered; “two more ran away, and now three are coming, and have got paid for four, and the first three who ran away got paid, and the Express man’s so ashamed for a foreigner, and the Governor’s in a furious rage.”
Except for the loss of time it made no difference to me, but when the kuruma did come up the runners were three such ruffianly-looking men, and were dressed so wildly in bark cloth, that, in sending Ito on twelve miles to secure relays, I sent my money along with him. These men, though there were three instead of two, never went out of a walk, and, as if on purpose, took the vehicle over every stone and into every rut, and kept up a savage chorus of “haes-ha, haes-hora” the whole time, as if they were pulling stone-carts. There are really no runners out of Hakodate, and the men don’t know how to pull, and hate doing it.
Mororan Bay is truly beautiful from the top of the ascent. The coast scenery of Japan generally is the loveliest I have ever seen, except that of a portion of windward Hawaii, and this yields in beauty to none. The irregular grey town, with a grey temple on the height above, straggles round the little bay on a steep, wooded terrace; hills, densely wooded, and with a perfect entanglement of large-leaved trailers, descend abruptly to the water’s edge; the festoons of the vines are mirrored in the still waters; and above the dark forest, and beyond the gleaming sea, rises the red, peaked top of the volcano. Then the road dips abruptly to sandy swellings, rising into bold headlands here and there; and for the first time I saw the surge of 5000 miles of unbroken ocean break upon the shore. Glimpses of the Pacific, an uncultivated, swampy level quite uninhabited, and distant hills mainly covered with forest, made up the landscape till I reached Horobets, a mixed Japanese and Aino village built upon the sand near the sea.
In these mixed villages the Ainos are compelled to live at a respectful distance from the Japanese, and frequently out-number them, as at Horobets, where there are forty-seven Aino and only eighteen Japanese houses. The Aino village looks larger than it really is, because nearly every house has a kura, raised six feet from the ground by wooden stilts. When I am better acquainted with the houses I shall describe them; at present I will only say that they do not resemble the Japanese houses so much as the Polynesian, as they are made of reeds very neatly tied upon a wooden framework. They have small windows, and roofs of a very great height, and steep pitch, with the thatch in a series of very neat frills, and the ridge poles covered with reeds, and ornamented. The coast Ainos are nearly all engaged in fishing, but at this season the men hunt deer in the forests. on this coast there are several names compounded with bets or pets, the Aino for a river, such as Horobets, Yubets, Mombets, etc.
I found that Ito had been engaged for a whole hour in a violent altercation, which was caused by the Transport Agent refusing to supply runners for the kuruma, saying that no one in Horobets would draw one, but on my producing the shomon I was at once started on my journey of sixteen miles with three Japanese lads, Ito riding on to Shiraoi to get my room ready. I think that the Transport Offices in Yezo are in Government hands. In a few minutes three Ainos ran out of a house, took the kuruma, and went the whole stage without stopping. They took a boy and three saddled horses along with them to bring them back, and rode and hauled alternately, two youths always attached to the shafts, and a man pushing behind. They were very kind, and so courteous, after a new fashion, that I quite forgot that I was alone among savages. The lads were young and beardless, their lips were thick, and their mouths very wide, and I thought that they approached more nearly to the Eskimo type than to any other. They had masses of soft black hair falling on each side of their faces. The adult man was not a pure Aino. His dark hair was not very thick, and both it and his beard had an occasional auburn gleam. I think I never saw a face more completely beautiful in features and ｅxpression, with a lofty, sad, far-off, gentle, intellectual look, rather that of Sir Noel Paton’s “Christ” than of a savage. His manner was most graceful, and he spoke both Aino and Japanese in the low musical tone which I find is a characteristic of Aino speech. These Ainos never took off their clothes, but merely let them fall from one or both shoulders when it was very warm.
The road from Horobets to Shiraoi is very solitary, with not more than four or five houses the whole way. It is broad and straight, except when it ascends hills or turns inland to cross rivers, and is carried across a broad swampy level, covered with tall wild flowers, which extends from the high beach thrown up by the sea for two miles inland, where there is a lofty wall of wooded rock, and beyond this the forest-covered mountains of the interior. on the top of the raised beach there were Aino hamlets, and occasionally a nearly overpowering stench came across the level from the sheds and apparatus used for extracting fish-oil. I enjoyed the afternoon thoroughly. It is so good to have got beyond the confines of stereotyped civilisation and the trammels of Japanese travelling to the solitude of nature and an atmosphere of freedom. It was grey, with a hard, dark line of ocean horizon, and over the weedy level the grey road, with grey telegraph-poles along it, stretched wearisomely like a grey thread. The breeze came up from the sea, rustled the reeds, and waved the tall plumes of the Eulalia japonica, and the thunder of the Pacific surges boomed through the air with its grand, deep bass. Poetry and music pervaded the solitude, and my spirit was rested.
Going up and then down a steep, wooded hill, the road appeared to return to its original state of brushwood, and the men stopped at the broken edge of a declivity which led down to a shingle bank and a foam-crested river of clear, blue-green water, strongly impregnated with sulphur from some medicinal springs above, with a steep bank of tangle on the opposite side. This beautiful stream was crossed by two round poles, a foot apart, on which I attempted to walk with the help of an Aino hand; but the poles were very unsteady, and I doubt whether any one, even with a strong head, could walk on them in boots. Then the beautiful Aino signed to me to come back and mount on his shoulders; but when he had got a few feet out the poles swayed and trembled so much that he was obliged to retrace his way cautiously, during which process I endured miseries from dizziness and fear; after which he carried me through the rushing water, which was up to his shoulders, and through a bit of swampy jungle, and up a steep bank, to the great fatigue both of body and mind, hardly mitigated by the enjoyment of the ludicrous in riding a savage through these Yezo waters. They dexterously carried the kuruma through, on the shoulders of four, and showed extreme anxiety that neither it nor I should get wet. After this we crossed two deep, still rivers in scows, and far above the grey level and the grey sea the sun was setting in gold and vermilion-streaked green behind a glorified mountain of great height, at whose feet the forest-covered hills lay in purple gloom. At dark we reached Shiraoi, a village of eleven Japanese houses, with a village of fifty-one Aino houses, near the sea. There is a large yadoya of the old style there; but I found that Ito had chosen a very pretty new one, with four stalls open to the road, in the centre one of which I found him, with the welcome news that a steak of fresh salmon was broiling on the coals; and, as the room was clean and sweet and I was very hungry, I enjoyed my meal by the light of a rush in a saucer of fish-oil as much as any part of the day.
SARUFUTO.
The night was too cold for sleep, and at daybreak, hearing a great din, I looked out, and saw a drove of fully a hundred horses all galloping down the road, with two Ainos on horse-back, and a number of big dogs after them. Hundreds of horses run nearly wild on the hills, and the Ainos, getting a large drove together, skilfully head them for the entrance into the corral, in which a selection of them is made for the day’s needs, and the remainder — that is, those with the deepest sores on their backs — are turned loose. This dull rattle of shoeless feet is the first sound in the morning in these Yezo villages. I sent Ito on early, and followed at nine with three Ainos. The road is perfectly level for thirteen miles, through gravel flats and swamps, very monotonous, but with a wild charm of its own. There were swampy lakes, with wild ducks and small white water-lilies, and the surrounding levels were covered with reedy grass, flowers, and weeds. The early autumn has withered a great many of the flowers; but enough remains to show how beautiful the now russet plains must have been in the early summer. A dwarf rose, of a deep crimson colour, with orange, medlar-shaped hips, as large as crabs, and corollas three inches across, is one of the features of Yezo; and besides, there is a large rose-red convolvulus, a blue campanula, with tiers of bells, a blue monkshood, the Aconitum Japonicum, the flaunting Calystegia soldanella, purple asters, grass of Parnassus, yellow lilies, and a remarkable trailer, whose delicate leafage looked quite out of place among its coarse surroundings, with a purplish-brown campanulate blossom, only remarkable for a peculiar arrangement of the pistil, green stamens, and a most offensive carrion-like odour, which is probably to attract to it a very objectionable-looking fly, for purposes of fertilisation.
We overtook four Aino women, young and comely, with bare feet, striding firmly along; and after a good deal of laughing with the men, they took hold of the kuruma, and the whole seven raced with it at full speed for half a mile, shrieking with laughter. Soon after we came upon a little tea-house, and the Ainos showed me a straw package, and pointed to their open mouths, by which I understood that they wished to stop and eat. Later we overtook four Japanese on horseback, and the Ainos raced with them for a considerable distance, the result of these spurts being that I reached Tomakomai at noon — a wide, dreary place, with houses roofed with sod, bearing luxuriant crops of weeds. Near this place is the volcano of Tarumai, a calm-looking, grey cone, whose skirts are draped by tens of thousands of dead trees. So calm and grey had it looked for many a year that people supposed it had passed into endless rest, when quite lately, on a sultry day, it blew off its cap and covered the whole country for many a mile with cinders and ashes, burning up the forest on its sides, adding a new covering to the Tomakomai roofs, and depositing fine ash as far as Cape Erimo, fifty miles off.
At this place the road and telegraph wires turn inland to Satsuporo, and a track for horses only turns to the north-east, and straggles round the island for about seven hundred miles. From Mororan to Sarufuto there are everywhere traces of new and old volcanic action — pumice, tufas, conglomerates, and occasional beds of hard basalt, all covered with recent pumice, which, from Shiraoi eastwards, conceals everything. At Tomakomai we took horses, and, as I brought my own saddle, I have had the nearest approach to real riding that I have enjoyed in Japan. The wife of a Satsuporo doctor was there, who was travelling for two hundred miles astride on a pack-saddle, with rope-loops for stirrups. She rode well, and vaulted into my saddle with circus-like dexterity, and performed many equestrian feats upon it, telling me that she should be quite happy if she were possessed of it.
I was happy when I left the “beaten track” to Satsuporo, and saw before me, stretching for I know not how far, rolling, sandy machirs like those of the Outer Hebrides, desert-like and lonely, covered almost altogether with dwarf roses and campanulas, a prairie land on which you can make any tracks you please. Sending the others on, I followed them at the Yezo scramble, and soon ventured on a long gallop, and revelled in the music of the thud of shoeless feet over the elastic soil; but I had not realised the peculiarities of Yezo steeds, and had forgotten to ask whether mine was a “front horse,” and just as we were going at full speed we came nearly up with the others, and my horse coming abruptly to a full stop, I went six feet over his head among the rose-bushes. Ito looking back saw me tightening the saddle-girths, and I never divulged this escapade.
After riding eight miles along this breezy belt, with the sea on one side and forests on the other, we came upon Yubets, a place which has fascinated me so much that I intend to return to it; but I must confess that its fascinations depend rather upon what it has not than upon what it has, and Ito says that it would kill him to spend even two days there. It looks like the end of all things, as if loneliness and desolation could go no farther. A sandy stretch on three sides, a river arrested in its progress to the sea, and compelled to wander tediously in search of an outlet by the height and mass of the beach thrown up by the Pacific, a distant forest-belt rising into featureless, wooded ranges in shades of indigo and grey, and a never-absent consciousness of a vast ocean just out of sight, are the environments of two high look-outs, some sheds for fish-oil purposes, four or five Japanese houses, four Aino huts on the top of the beach across the river, and a grey barrack, consisting of a polished passage eighty feet long, with small rooms on either side, at one end a gravelled yard, with two quiet rooms opening upon it, and at the other an immense daidokoro, with dark recesses and blackened rafters — a haunted-looking abode. one would suppose that there had been a special object in setting the houses down at weary distances from each other. Few as they are, they are not all inhabited at this season, and all that can be seen is grey sand, sparse grass, and a few savages creeping about.
Nothing that I have seen has made such an impression upon me as that ghostly, ghastly fishing-station. In the long grey wall of the long grey barrack there were many dismal windows, and when we hooted for admission a stupid face appeared at one of them and disappeared. Then a grey gateway opened, and we rode into a yard of grey gravel, with some silent rooms opening upon it. The solitude of the thirty or forty rooms which lie between it and the kitchen, and which are now filled with nets and fishing-tackle, was something awful; and as the wind swept along the polished passage, rattling the fusuma and lifting the shingles on the roof, and the rats careered from end to end, I went to the great black daidokoro in search of social life, and found a few embers and an andon, and nothing else but the stupid-faced man deploring his fate, and two orphan boys whose lot he makes more wretched than his own. In the fishing-season this barrack accommodates from 200 to 300 men.
I started to the sea-shore, crossing the dreary river, and found open sheds much blackened, deserted huts of reeds, long sheds with a nearly insufferable odour from caldrons in which oil had been extracted from last year’s fish, two or three Aino huts, and two or three grand-looking Ainos, clothed in skins, striding like ghosts over the sandbanks, a number of wolfish dogs, some log canoes or “dug-outs,” the bones of a wrecked junk, a quantity of bleached drift-wood, a beach of dark-grey sand, and a tossing expanse of dark-grey ocean under a dull and windy sky. on this part of the coast the Pacific spends its fury, and has raised up at a short distance above high-water mark a sandy sweep of such a height that when you descend its seaward slope you see nothing but the sea and the sky, and a grey, curving shore, covered thick for many a lonely mile with fantastic forms of whitened drift-wood, the shattered wrecks of forest-trees, which are carried down by the innumerable rivers, till, after tossing for weeks and months along with
“— wrecks of ships, and drifting spars uplifting on the desolate, rainy seas: Ever drifting, drifting, drifting, on the shifting Currents of the restless main;”
the “toiling surges” cast them on Yubets beach, and
“All have found repose again.”
A grim repose!
The deep boom of the surf was music, and the strange cries of sea-birds, and the hoarse notes of the audacious black crows, were all harmonious, for nature, when left to herself, never produces discords either in sound or colour.
17 I venture to present this journal letter, with a few omissions, just as it was written, trusting that the interest which attaches to aboriginal races and little-visited regions will carry my readers through the minuteness and multiplicity of its details.
18 The use of kerosene in matted wooden houses is a new cause of conflagrations. It is not possible to say how it originated, but just before Christmas 1879 a fire broke out in Hakodate, which in a few hours destroyed 20 streets, 2500 houses, the British Consulate, several public buildings, the new native Christian church, and the church Mission House, leaving 11,000 people homeless.
Letter 35—(Continued)
The Harmonies of Nature — A Good Horse — A Single Discord — A Forest — Aino Ferrymen —“Les Puces! Les Puces!”— Baffled Explorers — Ito’s Contempt for Ainos — An Aino Introduction.
SARUFUTO.
No! Nature has no discords. This morning, to the far horizon, diamond-flashing blue water shimmered in perfect peace, outlined by a line of surf which broke lazily on a beach scarcely less snowy than itself. The deep, perfect blue of the sky was only broken by a few radiant white clouds, whose shadows trailed slowly over the plain on whose broad bosom a thousand corollas, in the glory of their brief but passionate life, were drinking in the sunshine, wavy ranges slept in depths of indigo, and higher hills beyond were painted in faint blue on the dreamy sky. Even the few grey houses of Yubets were spiritualised into harmony by a faint blue veil which was not a mist, and the loud croak of the loquacious and impertinent crows had a cheeriness about it, a hearty mockery, which I liked.
Above all, I had a horse so good that he was always trying to run away, and galloped so lightly over the flowery grass that I rode the seventeen miles here with great enjoyment. Truly a good horse, good ground to gallop on, and sunshine, make up the sum of enjoyable travelling. The discord in the general harmony was produced by the sight of the Ainos, a harmless people without the instinct of progress, descending to that vast tomb of conquered and unknown races which has opened to receive so many before them. A mounted policeman started with us from Yubets, and rode the whole way here, keeping exactly to my pace, but never speaking a word. We forded one broad, deep river, and crossed another, partly by fording and partly in a scow, after which the track left the level, and, after passing through reedy grass as high as the horse’s ears, went for some miles up and down hill, through woods composed entirely of the Ailanthus glandulosus, with leaves much riddled by the mountain silk-worm, and a ferny undergrowth of the familiar Pteris aquilina. The deep shade and glancing lights of this open copsewood were very pleasant; and as the horse tripped gaily up and down the little hills, and the sea murmur mingled with the rustle of the breeze, and a glint of white surf sometimes flashed through the greenery, and dragonflies and butterflies in suits of crimson and black velvet crossed the path continually like “living flashes” of light, I was reminded somewhat, though faintly, of windward Hawaii. We emerged upon an Aino hut and a beautiful placid river, and two Ainos ferried the four people and horses across in a scow, the third wading to guide the boat. They wore no clothing, but only one was hairy. They were superb-looking men, gentle, and extremely courteous, handing me in and out of the boat, and holding the stirrup while I mounted, with much natural grace. on leaving they extended their arms and waved their hands inwards twice, stroking their grand beards afterwards, which is their usual salutation. A short distance over shingle brought us to this Japanese village of sixty-three houses, a colonisation settlement, mainly of samurai from the province of Sendai, who are raising very fine crops on the sandy soil. The mountains, twelve miles in the interior, have a large Aino population, and a few Ainos live near this village and are held in great contempt by its inhabitants. My room is on the village street, and, as it is too warm to close the shoji, the aborigines stand looking in at the lattice hour after hour.
A short time ago Mr. Von Siebold and Count Diesbach galloped up on their return from Biratori, the Aino village to which I am going; and Count D., throwing himself from his horse, rushed up to me with the exclamation, Les puces! les puces! They have brought down with them the chief, Benri, a superb but dissipated-looking savage. Mr. Von Siebold called on me this evening, and I envied him his fresh, clean clothing as much as he envied me my stretcher and mosquito-net. They have suffered terribly from fleas, mosquitoes, and general discomfort, and are much exhausted; but Mr. Von S. thinks that, in spite of all, a visit to the mountain Ainos is worth a long journey. As I expected, they have completely failed in their explorations, and have been deserted by Lieutenant Kreitner. I asked Mr. Von S. to speak to Ito in Japanese about the importance of being kind and courteous to the Ainos whose hospitality I shall receive; and Ito is very indignant at this. “Treat Ainos politely!” he says; “they’re just dogs, not men;” and since he has regaled me with all the scandal concerning them which he has been able to rake together in the village.
We have to take not only food for both Ito and myself, but cooking utensils. I have been introduced to Benri, the chief; and, though he does not return for a day or two, he will send a message along with us which will ensure me hospitality.
I. L. B.
Letter 36
Savage Life — A Forest Track — Cleanly Villages — A Hospitable Reception — The Chief’s Mother — The Evening Meal — A Savage Seance — Libations to the Gods — Nocturnal Silence — Aino Courtesy — The Chief’s Wife.
AINO HUT, BIRATORI, August 23.
I am in the lonely Aino land, and I think that the most interesting of my travelling experiences has been the living for three days and two nights in an Aino hut, and seeing and sharing the daily life of complete savages, who go on with their ordinary occupations just as if I were not among them. I found yesterday a most fatiguing and over-exciting day, as everything was new and interesting, even the extracting from men who have few if any ideas in common with me all I could extract concerning their religion and customs, and that through an interpreter. I got up at six this morning to write out my notes, and have been writing for five hours, and there is shortly the prospect of another savage seance. The distractions, as you can imagine, are many. At this moment a savage is taking a cup of sake by the fire in the centre of the floor. He salutes me by extending his hands and waving them towards his face, and then dips a rod in the sake, and makes six libations to the god — an upright piece of wood with a fringe of shavings planted in the floor of the room. Then he waves the cup several times towards himself, makes other libations to the fire, and drinks. Ten other men and women are sitting along each side of the fire-hole, the chief’s wife is cooking, the men are apathetically contemplating the preparation of their food; and the other women, who are never idle, are splitting the bark of which they make their clothes. I occupy the guest seat — a raised platform at one end of the fire, with the skin of a black bear thrown over it.
I have reserved all I have to say about the Ainos till I had been actually among them, and I hope you will have patience to read to the end. Ito is very greedy and self-indulgent, and whimpered very much about coming to Biratori at all — one would have thought he was going to the stake. He actually borrowed for himself a sleeping mat and futons, and has brought a chicken, onions, potatoes, French beans, Japanese sauce, tea, rice, a kettle, a stew-pan, and a rice-pan, while I contented myself with a cold fowl and potatoes.
We took three horses and a mounted Aino guide, and found a beaten track the whole way. It turns into the forest at once on leaving Sarufuto, and goes through forest the entire distance, with an abundance of reedy grass higher than my hat on horseback along it, and, as it is only twelve inches broad and much overgrown, the horses were constantly pushing through leafage soaking from a night’s rain, and I was soon wet up to my shoulders. The forest trees are almost solely the Ailanthus glandulosus and the Zelkowa keaki, often matted together with a white-flowered trailer of the Hydrangea genus. The undergrowth is simply hideous, consisting mainly of coarse reedy grass, monstrous docks, the large-leaved Polygonum cuspidatum, several umbelliferous plants, and a “ragweed” which, like most of its gawky fellows, grows from five to six feet high. The forest is dark and very silent, threaded by this narrow path, and by others as narrow, made by the hunters in search of game. The “main road” sometimes plunges into deep bogs, at others is roughly corduroyed by the roots of trees, and frequently hangs over the edge of abrupt and much-worn declivities, in going up one of which the baggage-horse rolled down a bank fully thirty feet high, and nearly all the tea was lost. At another the guide’s pack-saddle lost its balance, and man, horse, and saddle went over the slope, pots, pans, and packages flying after them. At another time my horse sank up to his chest in a very bad bog, and, as he was totally unable to extricate himself, I was obliged to scramble upon his neck and jump to terra firma over his ears.
There is something very gloomy in the solitude of this silent land, with its beast-haunted forests, its great patches of pasture, the resort of wild animals which haunt the lower regions in search of food when the snow drives them down from the mountains, and its narrow track, indicating the single file in which the savages of the interior walk with their bare, noiseless feet. Reaching the Sarufutogawa, a river with a treacherous bottom, in which Mr. Von Siebold and his horse came to grief, I hailed an Aino boy, who took me up the stream in a “dug-out,” and after that we passed through Biroka, Saruba, and Mina, all purely Aino villages, situated among small patches of millet, tobacco, and pumpkins, so choked with weeds that it was doubtful whether they were crops. I was much surprised with the extreme neatness and cleanliness outside the houses; “model villages” they are in these respects, with no litter lying in sight anywhere, nothing indeed but dog troughs, hollowed out of logs, like “dug-outs,” for the numerous yellow dogs, which are a feature of Aino life. There are neither puddles nor heaps, but the houses, all trim and in good repair, rise clean out of the sandy soil.
Biratori, the largest of the Aino settlements in this region, is very prettily situated among forests and mountains, on rising ground, with a very sinuous river winding at its feet and a wooded height above. A lonelier place could scarcely be found. As we passed among the houses the yellow dogs barked, the women looked shy and smiled, and the men made their graceful salutation. We stopped at the chief’s house, where, of course, we were unexpected guests; but Shinondi, his nephew, and two other men came out, saluted us, and with most hospitable intent helped Ito to unload the horses. Indeed their eager hospitality created quite a commotion, one running hither and the other thither in their anxiety to welcome a stranger. It is a large house, the room being 35 by 25, and the roof 20 feet high; but you enter by an ante-chamber, in which are kept the millet-mill and other articles. There is a doorway in this, but the inside is pretty dark, and Shinondi, taking my hand, raised the reed curtain bound with hide, which concealed the entrance into the actual house, and, leading me into it, retired a footstep, extended his arms, waved his arms inwards three times, and then stroked his beard several times, after which he indicated by a sweep of his hand and a beautiful smile that the house and all it contained were mine. An aged woman, the chief’s mother, who was splitting bark by the fire, waved her hands also. She is the queen-regnant of the house.
Again taking my hand, Shinondi led me to the place of honour at the head of the fire — a rude, movable platform six feet long by four broad, and a foot high, on which he laid an ornamental mat, apologising for not having at that moment a bearskin wherewith to cover it. The baggage was speedily brought in by several willing pairs of hands; some reed mats fifteen feet long were laid down upon the very coarse ones which covered the whole floor, and when they saw Ito putting up my stretcher they hung a fine mat along the rough wall to conceal it, and suspended another on the beams of the roof for a canopy. The alacrity and instinctive hospitality with which these men rushed about to make things comfortable were very fascinating, though comfort is a word misapplied in an Aino hut. The women only did what the men told them.
They offered food at once, but I told them that I had brought my own, and would only ask leave to cook it on their fire. I need not have brought any cups, for they have many lacquer bowls, and Shinondi brought me on a lacquer tray a bowl full of water from one of their four wells. They said that Benri, the chief, would wish me to make his house my own for as long as I cared to stay, and I must excuse them in all things in which their ways were different from my own. Shinondi and four others in the village speak tolerable Japanese, and this of course is the medium of communication. Ito has exerted himself nobly as an interpreter, and has entered into my wishes with a cordiality and intelligence which have been perfectly invaluable; and, though he did growl at Mr. Von Siebold’s injunctions regarding politeness, he has carried them out to my satisfaction, and even admits that the mountain Ainos are better than he expected; “but,” he added “they have learned their politeness from the Japanese!” They have never seen a foreign woman, and only three foreign men, but there is neither crowding nor staring as among the Japanese, possibly in part from apathy and want of intelligence. For three days they have kept up their graceful and kindly hospitality, going on with their ordinary life and occupations, and, though I have lived among them in this room by day and night, there has been nothing which in any way could offend the most fastidious sense of delicacy.
They said they would leave me to eat and rest, and all retired but the chief’s mother, a weird, witch-like woman of eighty, with shocks of yellow-white hair, and a stern suspiciousness in her wrinkled face. I have come to feel as if she had the evil eye, as she sits there watching, watching always, and for ever knotting the bark thread like one of the Fates, keeping a jealous watch on her son’s two wives, and on other young women who come in to weave — neither the dulness nor the repose of old age about her; and her eyes gleam with a greedy light when she sees sake, of which she drains a bowl without taking breath. She alone is suspicious of strangers, and she thinks that my visit bodes no good to her tribe. I see her eyes fixed upon me now, and they make me shudder.
I had a good meal seated in my chair on the top of the guest-seat to avoid the fleas, which are truly legion. At dusk Shinondi returned, and soon people began to drop in, till eighteen were assembled, including the sub-chief and several very grand-looking old men, with full, grey, wavy beards. Age is held in much reverence, and it is etiquette for these old men to do honour to a guest in the chief’s absence. As each entered he saluted me several times, and after sitting down turned towards me and saluted again, going through the same ceremony with every other person. They said they had come “to bid me welcome.” They took their places in rigid order at each side of the fireplace, which is six feet long, Benri’s mother in the place of honour at the right, then Shinondi, then the sub-chief, and on the other side the old men. Besides these, seven women sat in a row in the background splitting bark. A large iron pan hung over the fire from a blackened arrangement above, and Benri’s principal wife cut wild roots, green beans, and seaweed, and shred dried fish and venison among them, adding millet, water, and some strong-smelling fish-oil, and set the whole on to stew for three hours, stirring the “mess” now and then with a wooden spoon.
Several of the older people smoke, and I handed round some mild tobacco, which they received with waving hands. I told them that I came from a land in the sea, very far away, where they saw the sun go down — so very far away that a horse would have to gallop day and night for five weeks to reach it — and that I had come a long journey to see them, and that I wanted to ask them many questions, so that when I went home I might tell my own people something about them. Shinondi and another man, who understood Japanese, bowed, and (as on every occasion) translated what I said into Aino for the venerable group opposite. Shinondi then said “that he and Shinrichi, the other Japanese speaker, would tell me all they knew, but they were but young men, and only knew what was told to them. They would speak what they believed to be true, but the chief knew more than they, and when he came back he might tell me differently, and then I should think that they had spoken lies.” I said that no one who looked into their faces could think that they ever told lies. They were very much pleased, and waved their hands and stroked their beards repeatedly. Before they told me anything they begged and prayed that I would not inform the Japanese Government that they had told me of their customs, or harm might come to them!
For the next two hours, and for two more after supper, I asked them questions concerning their religion and customs, and again yesterday for a considerable time, and this morning, after Benri’s return, I went over the same subjects with him, and have also employed a considerable time in getting about 300 words from them, which I have spelt phonetically of course, and intend to go over again when I visit the coast Ainos. 19
The process was slow, as both question and answer had to pass through three languages. There was a very manifest desire to tell the truth, and I think that their statements concerning their few and simple customs may be relied upon. I shall give what they told me separately when I have time to write out my notes in an orderly manner. I can only say that I have seldom spent a more interesting evening.
About nine the stew was ready, and the women ladled it into lacquer bowls with wooden spoons. The men were served first, but all ate together. Afterwards sake, their curse, was poured into lacquer bowls, and across each bowl a finely-carved “sake-stick” was laid. These sticks are very highly prized. The bowls were waved several times with an inward motion, then each man took his stick and, dipping it into the sake, made six libations to the fire and several to the “god”— a wooden post, with a quantity of spiral white shavings falling from near the top. The Ainos are not affected by sake nearly so easily as the Japanese. They took it cold, it is true, but each drank about three times as much as would have made a Japanese foolish, and it had no effect upon them. After two hours more talk one after another got up and went out, making profuse salutations to me and to the others. My candles had been forgotten, and our seance was held by the fitful light of the big logs on the fire, aided by a succession of chips of birch bark, with which a woman replenished a cleft stick that was stuck into the fire-hole. I never saw such a strangely picturesque sight as that group of magnificent savages with the fitful firelight on their faces, and for adjuncts the flare of the torch, the strong lights, the blackness of the recesses of the room and of the roof, at one end of which the stars looked in, and the row of savage women in the background — eastern savagery and western civilisation met in this hut, savagery giving and civilisation receiving, the yellow-skinned Ito the connecting-link between the two, and the representative of a civilisation to which our own is but an “infant of days.”
I found it very exciting, and when all had left crept out into the starlight. The lodges were all dark and silent, and the dogs, mild like their masters, took no notice of me. The only sound was the rustle of a light breeze through the surrounding forest. The verse came into my mind, “It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.” Surely these simple savages are children, as children to be judged; may we not hope as children to be saved through Him who came “not to judge the world, but to save the world”?
I crept back again and into my mosquito net, and suffered not from fleas or mosquitoes, but from severe cold. Shinondi conversed with Ito for some time in a low musical voice, having previously asked if it would keep me from sleeping. No Japanese ever intermitted his ceaseless chatter at any hour of the night for a similar reason. Later, the chief’s principal wife, Noma, stuck a triply-cleft stick in the fire-hole, put a potsherd with a wick and some fish-oil upon it, and by the dim light of this rude lamp sewed until midnight at a garment of bark cloth which she was ornamenting for her lord with strips of blue cloth, and when I opened my eyes the next morning she was at the window sewing by the earliest daylight. She is the most intelligent-looking of all the women, but looks sad and almost stern, and speaks seldom. Although she is the principal wife of the chief she is not happy, for she is childless, and I thought that her sad look darkened into something evil as the other wife caressed a fine baby boy. Benri seems to me something of a brute, and the mother-inlaw obviously holds the reins of government pretty tight. After sewing till midnight she swept the mats with a bunch of twigs, and then crept into her bed behind a hanging mat. For a moment in the stillness I felt a feeling of panic, as if I were incurring a risk by being alone among savages, but I conquered it, and, after watching the fire till it went out, fell asleep till I was awoke by the severe cold of the next day’s dawn.
19 I went over them with the Ainos of a remote village on Volcano Bay, and found the differences in pronunciation very slight, except that the definiteness of the sound which I have represented by Tsch was more strongly marked. I afterwards went over them with Mr. Dening, and with Mr. Von Siebold at Tokiyo, who have made a larger collection of words than I have, and it is satisfactory to find that we have represented the words in the main by the same letters, with the single exception that usually the sound represented by them by the letters ch I have given as Tsch, and I venture to think that is the most correct rendering.
Letter 36—(Continued)
A Supposed Act of Worship — Parental Tenderness — Morning Visits — Wretched Cultivation — Honesty and Generosity — A “Dug-out”— Female Occupations — The Ancient Fate — A New Arrival — A Perilous Prescription — The Shrine of Yoshitsune — The Chief’s Return.
When I crept from under my net much benumbed with cold, there were about eleven people in the room, who all made their graceful salutation. It did not seem as if they had ever heard of washing, for, when water was asked for, Shinondi brought a little in a lacquer bowl, and held it while I bathed my face and hands, supposing the performance to be an act of worship! I was about to throw some cold tea out of the window by my bed when he arrested me with an anxious face, and I saw, what I had not observed before, that there was a god at that window — a stick with festoons of shavings hanging from it, and beside it a dead bird. The Ainos have two meals a day, and their breakfast was a repetition of the previous night’s supper. We all ate together, and I gave the children the remains of my rice, and it was most amusing to see little creatures of three, four, and five years old, with no other clothing than a piece of pewter hanging round their necks, first formally asking leave of the parents before taking the rice, and then waving their hands. The obedience of the children is instantaneous. Their parents are more demonstrative in their affection than the Japanese are, caressing them a good deal, and two of the men are devoted to children who are not their own. These little ones are as grave and dignified as Japanese children, and are very gentle.
I went out soon after five, when the dew was glittering in the sunshine, and the mountain hollow in which Biratori stands was looking its very best, and the silence of the place, even though the people were all astir, was as impressive as that of the night before. What a strange life! knowing nothing, hoping nothing, fearing a little, the need for clothes and food the one motive principle, sake in abundance the one good! How very few points of contact it is possible to have! I was just thinking so when Shinondi met me, and took me to his house to see if I could do anything for a child sorely afflicted with skin disease, and his extreme tenderness for this very loathsome object made me feel that human affections were the same among them as with us. He had carried it on his back from a village, five miles distant, that morning, in the hope that it might be cured. As soon as I entered he laid a fine mat on the floor, and covered the guest-seat with a bearskin. After breakfast he took me to the lodge of the sub-chief, the largest in the village, 45 feet square, and into about twenty others all constructed in the same way, but some of them were not more than 20 feet square. In all I was received with the same courtesy, but a few of the people asked Shinondi not to take me into their houses, as they did not want me to see how poor they are. In every house there was the low shelf with more or fewer curios upon it, but, besides these, none but the barest necessaries of life, though the skins which they sell or barter every year would enable them to surround themselves with comforts, were it not that their gains represent to them sake, and nothing else. They are not nomads. on the contrary, they cling tenaciously to the sites on which their fathers have lived and died. But anything more deplorable than the attempts at cultivation which surround their lodges could not be seen. The soil is little better than white sand, on which without manure they attempt to grow millet, which is to them in the place of rice, pumpkins, onions, and tobacco; but the look of their plots is as if they had been cultivated ten years ago, and some chance-sown grain and vegetables had come up among the weeds. When nothing more will grow, they partially clear another bit of forest, and exhaust that in its turn.
In every house the same honour was paid to a guest. This seems a savage virtue which is not strong enough to survive much contact with civilisation. Before I entered one lodge the woman brought several of the finer mats, and arranged them as a pathway for me to walk to the fire upon. They will not accept anything for lodging, or for anything that they give, so I was anxious to help them by buying some of their handiwork, but found even this a difficult matter. They were very anxious to give, but when I desired to buy they said they did not wish to part with their things. I wanted what they had in actual use, such as a tobacco-box and pipe-sheath, and knives with carved handles and scabbards, and for three of these I offered 2.5 dollars. They said they did not care to sell them, but in the evening they came saying they were not worth more than 1 dollar 10 cents, and they would sell them for that; and I could not get them to take more. They said it was “not their custom.” I bought a bow and three poisoned arrows, two reed-mats, with a diamond pattern on them in reeds stained red, some knives with sheaths, and a bark cloth dress. I tried to buy the sake-sticks with which they make libations to their gods, but they said it was “not their custom” to part with the sake-stick of any living man; however, this morning Shinondi has brought me, as a very valuable present, the stick of a dead man! This morning the man who sold the arrows brought two new ones, to replace two which were imperfect. I found them, as Mr. Von Siebold had done, punctiliously honest in all their transactions. They wear very large earrings with hoops an inch and a half in diameter, a pair constituting the dowry of an Aino bride; but they would not part with these.
A house was burned down two nights ago, and “custom” in such a case requires that all the men should work at rebuilding it, so in their absence I got two boys to take me in a “dug-out” as far as we could go up the Sarufutogawa — a lovely river, which winds tortuously through the forests and mountains in unspeakable loveliness. I had much of the feeling of the ancient mariner —
“We were the first Who ever burst Into that silent sea.”
For certainly no European had ever previously floated on the dark and forest-shrouded waters. I enjoyed those hours thoroughly, for the silence was profound, and the faint blue of the autumn sky, and the soft blue veil which “spiritualised” the distances, were so exquisitely like the Indian summer.
The evening was spent like the previous one, but the hearts of the savages were sad, for there was no more sake in Biratori, so they could not “drink to the god,” and the fire and the post with the shavings had to go without libations. There was no more oil, so after the strangers retired the hut was in complete darkness.
Yesterday morning we all breakfasted soon after daylight, and the able-bodied men went away to hunt. Hunting and fishing are their occupations, and for “indoor recreation” they carve tobacco-boxes, knife-sheaths, sake-sticks, and shuttles. It is quite unnecessary for them to do anything; they are quite contented to sit by the fire, and smoke occasionally, and eat and sleep, this apathy being varied by spasms of activity when there is no more dried flesh in the kuras, and when skins must be taken to Sarufuto to pay for sake. The women seem never to have an idle moment. They rise early to sew, weave, and split bark, for they not only clothe themselves and their husbands in this nearly indestructible cloth, but weave it for barter, and the lower class of Japanese are constantly to be seen wearing the product of Aino industry. They do all the hard work, such as drawing water, chopping wood, grinding millet, and cultivating the soil, after their fashion; but, to do the men justice, I often see them trudging along carrying one and even two children. The women take the exclusive charge of the kuras, which are never entered by men.
I was left for some hours alone with the women, of whom there were seven in the hut, with a few children. on the one side of the fire the chief’s mother sat like a Fate, for ever splitting and knotting bark, and petrifying me by her cold, fateful eyes. Her thick, grey hair hangs in shocks, the tattooing round her mouth has nearly faded, and no longer disguises her really handsome features. She is dressed in a much ornamented bark-cloth dress, and wears two silver beads tied round her neck by a piece of blue cotton, in addition to very large earrings. She has much sway in the house, sitting on the men’s side of the fire, drinking plenty of sake, and occasionally chiding her grandson Shinondi for telling me too much, saying that it will bring harm to her people. Though her ｅxpression is so severe and forbidding, she is certainly very handsome, and it is a European, not an Asiatic, beauty.
The younger women were all at work; two were seated on the floor weaving without a loom, and the others were making and mending the bark coats which are worn by both sexes. Noma, the chief’s principal wife, sat apart, seldom speaking. Two of the youngest women are very pretty — as fair as ourselves, and their comeliness is of the rosy, peasant kind. It turns out that two of them, though they would not divulge it before men, speak Japanese, and they prattled to Ito with great vivacity and merriment, the ancient Fate scowling at them the while from under her shaggy eyebrows. I got a number of words from them, and they laughed heartily at my erroneous pronunciation. They even asked me a number of questions regarding their own sex among ourselves, but few of these would bear repetition, and they answered a number of mine. As the merriment increased the old woman looked increasingly angry and restless, and at last rated them sharply, as I have heard since, telling them that if they spoke another word she should tell their husbands that they had been talking to strangers. After this not another word was spoken, and Noma, who is an industrious housewife, boiled some millet into a mash for a mid-day lunch. During the afternoon a very handsome young Aino, with a washed, richly-coloured skin and fine clear eyes, came up from the coast, where he had been working at the fishing. He saluted the old woman and Benri’s wife on entering, and presented the former with a gourd of sake, bringing a greedy light into her eyes as she took a long draught, after which, saluting me, he threw himself down in the place of honour by the fire, with the easy grace of a staghound, a savage all over. His name is Pipichari, and he is the chief’s adopted son. He had cut his foot badly with a root, and asked me to cure it, and I stipulated that it should be bathed for some time in warm water before anything more was done, after which I bandaged it with lint. He said “he did not like me to touch his foot, it was not clean enough, my hands were too white,” etc.; but when I had dressed it, and the pain was much relieved, he bowed very low and then kissed my hand! He was the only one among them all who showed the slightest curiosity regarding my things. He looked at my scissors, touched my boots, and watched me, as I wrote, with the simple curiosity of a child. He could speak a little Japanese, but he said he was “too young to tell me anything, the older men would know.” He is a “total abstainer” from sake, and he says that there are four such besides himself among the large number of Ainos who are just now at the fishing at Mombets, and that the others keep separate from them, because they think that the gods will be angry with them for not drinking.
Several “patients,” mostly children, were brought in during the afternoon. Ito was much disgusted by my interest in these people, who, he repeated, “are just dogs,” referring to their legendary origin, of which they are not ashamed. His assertion that they have learned politeness from the Japanese is simply baseless. Their politeness, though of quite another and more manly stamp, is savage, not civilised. The men came back at dark, the meal was prepared, and we sat round the fire as before; but there was no sake, except in the possession of the old woman; and again the hearts of the savages were sad. I could multiply instances of their politeness. As we were talking, Pipichari, who is a very “untutored” savage, dropped his coat from one shoulder, and at once Shinondi signed to him to put it on again. Again, a woman was sent to a distant village for some oil as soon as they heard that I usually burned a light all night. Little acts of courtesy were constantly being performed; but I really appreciated nothing more than the quiet way in which they went on with the routine of their ordinary lives.
During the evening a man came to ask if I would go and see a woman who could hardly breathe; and I found her very ill of bronchitis, accompanied with much fever. She was lying in a coat of skins, tossing on the hard boards of her bed, with a matting-covered roll under her head, and her husband was trying to make her swallow some salt-fish. I took her dry, hot hand — such a small hand, tattooed all over the back — and it gave me a strange thrill. The room was full of people, and they all seemed very sorry. A medical missionary would be of little use here; but a medically-trained nurse, who would give medicines and proper food, with proper nursing, would save many lives and much suffering. It is of no use to tell these people to do anything which requires to be done more than once: they are just like children. I gave her some chlorodyne, which she swallowed with difficulty, and left another dose ready mixed, to give her in a few hours; but about midnight they came to tell me that she was worse; and on going I found her very cold and weak, and breathing very hard, moving her head wearily from side to side. I thought she could not live for many hours, and was much afraid that they would think that I had killed her. I told them that I thought she would die; but they urged me to do something more for her, and as a last hope I gave her some brandy, with twenty-five drops of chlorodyne, and a few spoonfuls of very strong beef-tea. She was unable, or more probably unwilling, to make the effort to swallow it, and I poured it down her throat by the wild glare of strips of birch bark. An hour later they came back to tell me that she felt as if she were very drunk; but, going back to her house, I found that she was sleeping quietly, and breathing more easily; and, creeping back just at dawn, I found her still sleeping, and with her pulse stronger and calmer. She is now decidedly better and quite sensible, and her husband, the sub-chief, is much delighted. It seems so sad that they have nothing fit for a sick person’s food; and though I have made a bowl of beef-tea with the remains of my stock, it can only last one day.
I was so tired with these nocturnal expeditions and anxieties that on lying down I fell asleep, and on waking found more than the usual assemblage in the room, and the men were obviously agog about something. They have a singular, and I hope an unreasonable, fear of the Japanese Government. Mr. Von Siebold thinks that the officials threaten and knock them about; and this is possible; but I really think that the Kaitaikushi Department means well by them, and, besides removing the oppressive restrictions by which, as a conquered race, they were fettered, treats them far more humanely and equitably than the U.S. Government, for instance, treats the North American Indians. However, they are ignorant; and one of the men, who had been most grateful because I said I would get Dr. Hepburn to send some medicine for his child, came this morning and begged me not to do so, as, he said, “the Japanese Government would be angry.” After this they again prayed me not to tell the Japanese Government that they had told me their customs and then they began to talk earnestly together.
The sub-chief then spoke, and said that I had been kind to their sick people, and they would like to show me their temple, which had never been seen by any foreigner; but they were very much afraid of doing so, and they asked me many times “not to tell the Japanese Government that they showed it to me, lest some great harm should happen to them.” The sub-chief put on a sleeveless Japanese war-cloak to go up, and he, Shinondi, Pipichari, and two others accompanied me. It was a beautiful but very steep walk, or rather climb, to the top of an abrupt acclivity beyond the village, on which the temple or shrine stands. It would be impossible to get up were it not for the remains of a wooden staircase, not of Aino construction. Forest and mountain surround Biratori, and the only breaks in the dense greenery are glints of the shining waters of the Sarufutogawa, and the tawny roofs of the Aino lodges. It is a lonely and a silent land, fitter for the HIDING place than the DWELLING place of men.
When the splendid young savage, Pipichari, saw that I found it difficult to get up, he took my hand and helped me up, as gently as an English gentleman would have done; and when he saw that I had greater difficulty in getting down, he all but insisted on my riding down on his back, and certainly would have carried me had not Benri, the chief, who arrived while we were at the shrine, made an end of it by taking my hand and helping me down himself. Their instinct of helpfulness to a foreign woman strikes me as so odd, because they never show any courtesy to their own women, whom they treat (though to a less extent than is usual among savages) as inferior beings.
On the very edge of the cliff, at the top of the zigzag, stands a wooden temple or shrine, such as one sees in any grove, or on any high place on the main island, obviously of Japanese construction, but concerning which Aino tradition is silent. No European had ever stood where I stood, and there was a solemnity in the knowledge. The sub-chief drew back the sliding doors, and all bowed with much reverence, It was a simple shrine of unlacquered wood, with a broad shelf at the back, on which there was a small shrine containing a figure of the historical hero Yoshitsune, in a suit of inlaid brass armour, some metal gohei, a pair of tarnished brass candle-sticks, and a coloured Chinese picture representing a junk. Here, then, I was introduced to the great god of the mountain Ainos. There is something very pathetic in these people keeping alive the memory of Yoshitsune, not on account of his martial exploits, but simply because their tradition tells them that he was kind to them. They pulled the bell three times to attract his attention, bowed three times, and made six libations of sake, without which ceremony he cannot be approached. They asked me to worship their god, but when I declined on the ground that I could only worship my own God, the Lord of Earth and Heaven, of the dead and of the living, they were too courteous to press their request. As to Ito, it did not signify to him whether or not he added another god to his already crowded Pantheon, and he “worshipped,” i.e. bowed down, most willingly before the great hero of his own, the conquering race.
While we were crowded there on the narrow ledge of the cliff, Benri, the chief, arrived — a square-built, broad-shouldered, elderly man, strong as an ox, and very handsome, but his ｅxpression is not pleasing, and his eyes are bloodshot with drinking. The others saluted him very respectfully, but I noticed then and since that his manner is very arbitrary, and that a blow not infrequently follows a word. He had sent a message to his people by Ito that they were not to answer any questions till he returned, but Ito very tactfully neither gave it nor told me of it, and he was displeased with the young men for having talked to me so much. His mother had evidently “peached.” I like him less than any of his tribe. He has some fine qualities, truthfulness among others, but he has been contaminated by the four or five foreigners that he has seen, and is a brute and a sot. The hearts of his people are no longer sad, for there is sake in every house to-night.
I. L. B.
Letter 37
Barrenness of Savage Life — Irreclaimable Savages — The Aino Physique — Female Comeliness — Torture and Ornament — Child Life — Docility and Obedience.
BIRATORI, YEZO, August 24.
I expected to have written out my notes on the Ainos in the comparative quiet and comfort of Sarufuto, but the delay in Benri’s return, and the non-arrival of the horses, have compelled me to accept Aino hospitality for another night, which involves living on tea and potatoes, for my stock of food is exhausted. In some respects I am glad to remain longer, as it enables me to go over my stock of words, as well as my notes, with the chief, who is intelligent and it is a pleasure to find that his statements confirm those which have been made by the young men. The glamour which at first disguises the inherent barrenness of savage life has had time to pass away, and I see it in all its nakedness as a life not much raised above the necessities of animal existence, timid, monotonous, barren of good, dark, dull, “without hope, and without God in the world;” though at its lowest and worst considerably higher and better than that of many other aboriginal races, and — must I say it? — considerably higher and better than that of thousands of the lapsed masses of our own great cities who are baptized into Christ’s name, and are laid at last in holy ground, inasmuch as the Ainos are truthful, and, on the whole, chaste, hospitable, honest, reverent, and kind to the aged. Drinking, their great vice, is not, as among us, in antagonism to their religion, but is actually a part of it, and as such would be exceptionally difficult to eradicate.
The early darkness has once again come on, and once again the elders have assembled round the fire in two long lines, with the younger men at the ends, Pipichari, who yesterday sat in the place of honour and was helped to food first as the newest arrival, taking his place as the youngest at the end of the right-hand row. The birch-bark chips beam with fitful glare, the evening sake bowls are filled, the fire-god and the garlanded god receive their libations, the ancient woman, still sitting like a Fate, splits bark, and the younger women knot it, and the log-fire lights up as magnificent a set of venerable heads as painter or sculptor would desire to see — heads, full of — what? They have no history, their traditions are scarcely worthy the name, they claim descent from a dog, their houses and persons swarm with vermin, they are sunk in the grossest ignorance, they have no letters or any numbers above a thousand, they are clothed in the bark of trees and the untanned skins of beasts, they worship the bear, the sun, moon, fire, water, and I know not what, they are uncivilisable and altogether irreclaimable savages, yet they are attractive, and in some ways fascinating, and I hope I shall never forget the music of their low, sweet voices, the soft light of their mild, brown eyes, and the wonderful sweetness of their smile.
After the yellow skins, the stiff horse hair, the feeble eyelids, the elongated eyes, the sloping eyebrows, the flat noses, the sunken chests, the Mongolian features, the puny physique, the shaky walk of the men, the restricted totter of the women, and the general impression of degeneracy conveyed by the appearance of the Japanese, the Ainos make a very singular impression. All but two or three that I have seen are the most ferocious-looking of savages, with a physique vigorous enough for carrying out the most ferocious intentions, but as soon as they speak the countenance brightens into a smile as gentle as that of a woman, something which can never be forgotten.
The men are about the middle height, broad-chested, broad-shouldered, “thick set,” very strongly built, the arms and legs short, thick, and muscular, the hands and feet large. The bodies, and specially the limbs, of many are covered with short bristly hair. I have seen two boys whose backs are covered with fur as fine and soft as that of a cat. The heads and faces are very striking. The foreheads are very high, broad, and prominent, and at first sight give one the impression of an unusual capacity for intellectual development; the ears are small and set low; the noses are straight but short, and broad at the nostrils; the mouths are wide but well formed; and the lips rarely show a tendency to fulness. The neck is short, the cranium rounded, the cheek-bones low, and the lower part of the face is small as compared with the upper, the peculiarity called a “jowl” being unknown. The eyebrows are full, and form a straight line nearly across the face. The eyes are large, tolerably deeply set, and very beautiful, the colour a rich liquid brown, the ｅxpression singularly soft, and the eyelashes long, silky, and abundant. The skin has the Italian olive tint, but in most cases is thin, and light enough to show the changes of colour in the cheek. The teeth are small, regular, and very white; the incisors and “eye teeth” are not disproportionately large, as is usually the case among the Japanese; there is no tendency towards prognathism; and the fold of integument which conceals the upper eyelids of the Japanese is never to be met with. The features, ｅxpression, and aspect, are European rather than Asiatic.
The “ferocious savagery” of the appearance of the men is produced by a profusion of thick, soft, black hair, divided in the middle, and falling in heavy masses nearly to the shoulders. Out of doors it is kept from falling over the face by a fillet round the brow. The beards are equally profuse, quite magnificent, and generally wavy, and in the case of the old men they give a truly patriarchal and venerable aspect, in spite of the yellow tinge produced by smoke and want of cleanliness. The savage look produced by the masses of hair and beard, and the thick eyebrows, is mitigated by the softness in the dreamy brown eyes, and is altogether obliterated by the exceeding sweetness of the smile, which belongs in greater or less degree to all the rougher sex.
I have measured the height of thirty of the adult men of this village, and it ranges from 5 feet 4 inches to 5 feet 6.5 inches. The circumference of the heads averages 22.1 inches, and the arc, from ear to ear, 13 inches. According to Mr. Davies, the average weight of the Aino adult masculine brain, ascertained by measurement of Aino skulls, is 45.90 ounces avoirdupois, a brain weight said to exceed that of all the races, Hindoo and Mussulman, on the Indian plains, and that of the aboriginal races of India and Ceylon, and is only paralleled by that of the races of the Himalayas, the Siamese, and the Chinese Burmese. Mr. Davies says, further, that it exceeds the mean brain weight of Asiatic races in general. Yet with all this the Ainos are a stupid people!
Passing travellers who have seen a few of the Aino women on the road to Satsuporo speak of them as very ugly, but as making amends for their ugliness by their industry and conjugal fidelity. Of the latter there is no doubt, but I am not disposed to admit the former. The ugliness is certainly due to art and dirt. The Aino women seldom exceed five feet and half an inch in height, but they are beautifully formed, straight, lithe, and well-developed, with small feet and hands, well-arched insteps, rounded limbs, well-developed busts, and a firm, elastic gait. Their heads and faces are small; but the hair, which falls in masses on each side of the face like that of the men, is equally redundant. They have superb teeth, and display them liberally in smiling. Their mouths are somewhat wide, but well formed, and they have a ruddy comeliness about them which is pleasing, in spite of the disfigurement of the band which is tattooed both above and below the mouth, and which, by being united at the corners, enlarges its apparent size and width. A girl at Shiraoi, who, for some reason, has not been subjected to this process, is the most beautiful creature in features, colouring, and natural grace of form, that I have seen for a long time. Their complexions are lighter than those of the men. There are not many here even as dark as our European brunettes. A few unite the eyebrows by a streak of tattooing, so as to produce a straight line. Like the men, they cut their hair short for two or three inches above the nape of the neck, but instead of using a fillet they take two locks from the front and tie them at the back.
They are universally tattooed, not only with the broad band above and below the mouth, but with a band across the knuckles, succeeded by an elaborate pattern on the back of the hand, and a series of bracelets extending to the elbow. The process of disfigurement begins at the age of five, when some of the sufferers are yet unweaned. I saw the operation performed on a dear little bright girl this morning. A woman took a large knife with a sharp edge, and rapidly cut several horizontal lines on the upper lip, following closely the curve of the very pretty mouth, and before the slight bleeding had ceased carefully rubbed in some of the shiny soot which collects on the mat above the fire. In two or three days the scarred lip will be washed with the decoction of the bark of a tree to fix the pattern, and give it that blue look which makes many people mistake it for a daub of paint. A child who had this second process performed yesterday has her lip fearfully swollen and inflamed. The latest victim held her hands clasped tightly together while the cuts were inflicted, but never cried. The pattern on the lips is deepened and widened every year up to the time of marriage, and the circles on the arm are extended in a similar way. The men cannot give any reason for the universality of this custom. It is an old custom, they say, and part of their religion, and no woman could marry without it. Benri fancies that the Japanese custom of blackening the teeth is equivalent to it; but he is mistaken, as that ceremony usually succeeds marriage. They begin to tattoo the arms when a girl is five or six, and work from the elbow downwards. They expressed themselves as very much grieved and tormented by the recent prohibition of tattooing. They say the gods will be angry, and that the women can’t marry unless they are tattooed; and they implored both Mr. Von Siebold and me to intercede with the Japanese Government on their behalf in this respect. They are less apathetic on this than on any subject, and repeat frequently, “It’s a part of our religion.”
The children are very pretty and attractive, and their faces give promise of an intelligence which is lacking in those of the adults. They are much loved, and are caressing as well as caressed. The infants of the mountain Ainos have seeds of millet put into their mouths as soon as they are born, and those of the coast Ainos a morsel of salt-fish; and whatever be the hour of birth, “custom” requires that they shall not be fed until a night has passed. They are not weaned until they are at least three years old. Boys are preferred to girls, but both are highly valued, and a childless wife may be divorced.
Children do not receive names till they are four or five years old, and then the father chooses a name by which his child is afterwards known. Young children when they travel are either carried on their mothers’ backs in a net, or in the back of the loose garment; but in both cases the weight is mainly supported by a broad band which passes round the woman’s forehead. When men carry them they hold them in their arms. The hair of very young children is shaven, and from about five to fifteen the boys wear either a large tonsure or tufts above the ears, while the girls are allowed to grow hair all over their heads.
Implicit and prompt obedience is required from infancy; and from a very early age the children are utilised by being made to fetch and carry and go on messages. I have seen children apparently not more than two years old sent for wood; and even at this age they are so thoroughly trained in the observances of etiquette that babies just able to walk never toddle into or out of this house without formal salutations to each person within it, the mother alone excepted. They don’t wear any clothing till they are seven or eight years old, and are then dressed like their elders. Their manners to their parents are very affectionate. Even today, in the chief’s awe-inspiring presence, one dear little nude creature, who had been sitting quietly for two hours staring into the fire with her big brown eyes, rushed to meet her mother when she entered, and threw her arms round her, to which the woman responded by a look of true maternal tenderness and a kiss. These little creatures, in the absolute unconsciousness of innocence, with their beautiful faces, olive-tinted bodies — all the darker, sad to say, from dirt — their perfect docility, and absence of prying curiosity, are very bewitching. They all wear silver or pewter ornaments tied round their necks by a wisp of blue cotton.
Apparently the ordinary infantile maladies, such as whooping-cough and measles, do not afflict the Ainos fatally; but the children suffer from a cutaneous affection, which wears off as they reach the age of ten or eleven years, as well as from severe toothache with their first teeth.
Letter 37—(Continued)
Aino Clothing — Holiday Dress — Domestic Architecture — Household Gods — Japanese Curios — The Necessaries of Life — Clay Soup — Arrow Poison — Arrow–Traps — Female Occupations — Bark Cloth — The Art of Weaving.
Aino clothing, for savages, is exceptionally good. In the winter it consists of one, two, or more coats of skins, with hoods of the same, to which the men add rude moccasins when they go out hunting. In summer they wear kimonos, or loose coats, made of cloth woven from the split bark of a forest tree. This is a durable and beautiful fabric in various shades of natural buff, and somewhat resembles what is known to fancy workers as “Panama canvas.” Under this a skin or bark-cloth vest may or may not be worn. The men wear these coats reaching a little below the knees, folded over from right to left, and confined at the waist by a narrow girdle of the same cloth, to which is attached a rude, dagger-shaped knife, with a carved and engraved wooden handle and sheath. Smoking is by no means a general practice; consequently the pipe and tobacco-box are not, as with the Japanese, a part of ordinary male attire. Tightly-fitting leggings, either of bark-cloth or skin, are worn by both sexes, but neither shoes nor sandals. The coat worn by the women reaches half-way between the knees and ankles, and is quite loose and without a girdle. It is fastened the whole way up to the collar-bone; and not only is the Aino woman completely covered, but she will not change one garment for another except alone or in the dark. Lately a Japanese woman at Sarufuto took an Aino woman into her house, and insisted on her taking a bath, which she absolutely refused to do till the bath-house had been made quite private by means of screens. on the Japanese woman going back a little later to see what had become of her, she found her sitting in the water in her clothes; and on being remonstrated with, she said that the gods would be angry if they saw her without clothes!
Many of the garments for holiday occasions are exceedingly handsome, being decorated with “geometrical” patterns, in which the “Greek fret” takes part, in coarse blue cotton, braided most dexterously with scarlet and white thread. Some of the handsomest take half a year to make. The masculine dress is completed by an apron of oblong shape decorated in the same elaborate manner. These handsome savages, with their powerful physique, look remarkably well in their best clothes. I have not seen a boy or girl above nine who is not thoroughly clothed. The “jewels” of the women are large, hoop earrings of silver or pewter, with attachments of a classical pattern, and silver neck ornaments, and a few have brass bracelets soldered upon their arms. The women have a perfect passion for every hue of red, and I have made friends with them by dividing among them a large turkey-red silk handkerchief, strips of which are already being utilised for the ornamenting of coats.
The houses in the five villages up here are very good. So they are at Horobets, but at Shiraoi, where the aborigines suffer from the close proximity of several grog shops, they are inferior. They differ in many ways from any that I have before seen, approaching most nearly to the grass houses of the natives of Hawaii. Custom does not appear to permit either of variety or innovations; in all the style is the same, and the difference consists in the size and plenishings. The dwellings seem ill-fitted for a rigorous climate, but the same thing may be said of those of the Japanese. In their houses, as in their faces, the Ainos are more European than their conquerors, as they possess doorways, windows, central fireplaces, like those of the Highlanders of Scotland, and raised sleeping-places.
The usual appearance is that of a small house built on at the end of a larger one. The small house is the vestibule or ante-room, and is entered by a low doorway screened by a heavy mat of reeds. It contains the large wooden mortar and pestle with two ends, used for pounding millet, a wooden receptacle for millet, nets or hunting gear, and some bundles of reeds for repairing roof or walls. This room never contains a window. From it the large room is entered by a doorway, over which a heavy reed-mat, bound with hide, invariably hangs. This room in Benri’s case is 35 feet long by 25 feet broad, another is 45 feet square, the smallest measures 20 feet by 15. on entering, one is much impressed by the great height and steepness of the roof, altogether out of proportion to the height of the walls.
The frame of the house is of posts, 4 feet 10 inches high, placed 4 feet apart, and sloping slightly inwards. The height of the walls is apparently regulated by that of the reeds, of which only one length is used, and which never exceed 4 feet 10 inches. The posts are scooped at the top, and heavy poles, resting on the scoops, are laid along them to form the top of the wall. The posts are again connected twice by slighter poles tied on horizontally. The wall is double; the outer part being formed of reeds tied very neatly to the framework in small, regular bundles, the inner layer or wall being made of reeds attached singly. From the top of the pole, which is secured to the top of the posts, the framework of the roof rises to a height of twenty-two feet, made, like the rest, of poles tied to a heavy and roughly-hewn ridge-beam. At one end under the ridge-beam there is a large triangular aperture for the exit of smoke. Two very stout, roughly-hewn beams cross the width of the house, resting on the posts of the wall, and on props let into the floor, and a number of poles are laid at the same height, by means of which a secondary roof formed of mats can be at once extemporised, but this is only used for guests. These poles answer the same purpose as shelves. Very great care is bestowed upon the outside of the roof, which is a marvel of neatness and prettiness, and has the appearance of a series of frills being thatched in ridges. The ridge-pole is very thickly covered, and the thatch both there and at the corners is elaborately laced with a pattern in strong peeled twigs. The poles, which, for much of the room, run from wall to wall, compel one to stoop, to avoid fracturing one’s skull, and bringing down spears, bows and arrows, arrow-traps, and other primitive property. The roof and rafters are black and shiny from wood smoke. Immediately under them, at one end and one side, are small, square windows, which are closed at night by wooden shutters, which during the day-time hang by ropes. Nothing is a greater insult to an Aino than to look in at his window.
On the left of the doorway is invariably a fixed wooden platform, eighteen inches high, and covered with a single mat, which is the sleeping-place. The pillows are small stiff bolsters, covered with ornamental matting. If the family be large there are several of these sleeping platforms. A pole runs horizontally at a fitting distance above the outside edge of each, over which mats are thrown to conceal the sleepers from the rest of the room. The inside half of these mats is plain, but the outside, which is seen from the room, has a diamond pattern woven into it in dull reds and browns. The whole floor is covered with a very coarse reed-mat, with interstices half an inch wide. The fireplace, which is six feet long, is oblong. Above it, on a very black and elaborate framework, hangs a very black and shiny mat, whose superfluous soot forms the basis of the stain used in tattooing, and whose apparent purpose is to prevent the smoke ascending, and to diffuse it equally throughout the room. From this framework depends the great cooking-pot, which plays a most important part in Aino economy.
Household gods form an essential part of the furnishing of every house. In this one, at the left of the entrance, there are ten white wands, with shavings depending from the upper end, stuck in the wall; another projects from the window which faces the sunrise, and the great god — a white post, two feet high, with spirals of shavings depending from the top — is always planted in the floor, near the wall, on the left side, opposite the fire, between the platform bed of the householder and the low, broad shelf placed invariably on the same side, and which is a singular feature of all Aino houses, coast and mountain, down to the poorest, containing, as it does, Japanese curios, many of them very valuable objects of antique art, though much destroyed by damp and dust. They are true curiosities in the dwellings of these northern aborigines, and look almost solemn ranged against the wall. In this house there are twenty-four lacquered urns, or tea-chests, or seats, each standing two feet high on four small legs, shod with engraved or filigree brass. Behind these are eight lacquered tubs, and a number of bowls and lacquer trays, and above are spears with inlaid handles, and fine Kaga and Awata bowls. The lacquer is good, and several of the urns have daimiyo’s crests in gold upon them. one urn and a large covered bowl are beautifully inlaid with Venus’ ear. The great urns are to be seen in every house, and in addition there are suits of inlaid armour, and swords with inlaid hilts, engraved blades, and repousse scabbards, for which a collector would give almost anything. No offers, however liberal, can tempt them to sell any of these antique possessions. “They were presents,” they say in their low, musical voices; “they were presents from those who were kind to our fathers; no, we cannot sell them; they were presents.” And so gold lacquer, and pearl inlaying, and gold niello-work, and daimiyo’s crests in gold, continue to gleam in the smoky darkness of their huts. Some of these things were doubtless gifts to their fathers when they went to pay tribute to the representative of the Shogun and the Prince of Matsumae, soon after the conquest of Yezo. Others were probably gifts from samurai, who took refuge here during the rebellion, and some must have been obtained by barter. They are the one possession which they will not barter for sake, and are only parted with in payment of fines at the command of a chief, or as the dower of a girl.
Except in the poorest houses, where the people can only afford to lay down a mat for a guest, they cover the coarse mat with fine ones on each side of the fire. These mats and the bark-cloth are really their only manufactures. They are made of fine reeds, with a pattern in dull reds or browns, and are 14 feet long by 3 feet 6 inches wide. It takes a woman eight days to make one of them. In every house there are one or two movable platforms 6 feet by 4 and 14 inches high, which are placed at the head of the fireplace, and on which guests sit and sleep on a bearskin or a fine mat. In many houses there are broad seats a few inches high, on which the elder men sit cross-legged, as their custom is, not squatting Japanese fashion on the heels. A water-tub always rests on a stand by the door, and the dried fish and venison or bear for daily use hang from the rafters, as well as a few skins. Besides these things there are a few absolute necessaries — lacquer or wooden bowls for food and sake, a chopping-board and rude chopping-knife, a cleft-stick for burning strips of birch-bark, a triply-cleft stick for supporting the potsherd in which, on rare occasions, they burn a wick with oil, the component parts of their rude loom, the bark of which they make their clothes, the reeds of which they make their mats — and the inventory of the essentials of their life is nearly complete. No iron enters into the construction of their houses, its place being supplied by a remarkably tenacious fibre.
I have before described the preparation of their food, which usually consists of a stew “of abominable things.” They eat salt and fresh fish, dried fish, seaweed, slugs, the various vegetables which grow in the wilderness of tall weeds which surrounds their villages, wild roots and berries, fresh and dried venison and bear; their carnival consisting of fresh bear’s flesh and sake, seaweed, mushrooms, and anything they can get, in fact, which is not poisonous, mixing everything up together. They use a wooden spoon for stirring, and eat with chopsticks. They have only two regular meals a day, but eat very heartily. In addition to the eatables just mentioned they have a thick soup made from a putty-like clay which is found in one or two of the valleys. This is boiled with the bulb of a wild lily, and, after much of the clay has been allowed to settle, the liquid, which is very thick, is poured off. In the north, a valley where this earth is found is called Tsie-toi-nai, literally “eat-earth-valley.”
The men spend the autumn, winter, and spring in hunting deer and bears. Part of their tribute or taxes is paid in skins, and they subsist on the dried meat. Up to about this time the Ainos have obtained these beasts by means of poisoned arrows, arrow-traps, and pitfalls, but the Japanese Government has prohibited the use of poison and arrow-traps, and these men say that hunting is becoming extremely difficult, as the wild animals are driven back farther and farther into the mountains by the sound of the guns. However, they add significantly, “the eyes of the Japanese Government are not in every place!”
Their bows are only three feet long, and are made of stout saplings with the bark on, and there is no attempt to render them light or shapely at the ends. The wood is singularly inelastic. The arrows (of which I have obtained a number) are very peculiar, and are made in three pieces, the point consisting of a sharpened piece of bone with an elongated cavity on one side for the reception of the poison. This point or head is very slightly fastened by a lashing of bark to a fusiform piece of bone about four inches long, which is in its turn lashed to a shaft about fourteen inches long, the other end of which is sometimes equipped with a triple feather and sometimes is not.
The poison is placed in the elongated cavity in the head in a very soft state, and hardens afterwards. In some of the arrow-heads fully half a teaspoonful of the paste is inserted. From the nature of the very slight lashings which attach the arrow-head to the shaft, it constantly remains fixed in the slight wound that it makes, while the shaft falls off.
Pipichari has given me a small quantity of the poisonous paste, and has also taken me to see the plant from the root of which it is made, the Aconitum Japonicum, a monkshood, whose tall spikes of blue flowers are brightening the brushwood in all directions. The root is pounded into a pulp, mixed with a reddish earth like an iron ore pulverised, and again with animal fat, before being placed in the arrow. It has been said that the poison is prepared for use by being buried in the earth, but Benri says that this is needless. They claim for it that a single wound kills a bear in ten minutes, but that the flesh is not rendered unfit for eating, though they take the precaution of cutting away a considerable quantity of it round the wound.
Dr. Eldridge, formerly of Hakodate, obtained a small quantity of the poison, and, after trying some experiments with it, came to the conclusion that it is less virulent than other poisons employed for a like purpose, as by the natives of Java, the Bushmen, and certain tribes of the Amazon and Orinoco. The Ainos say that if a man is accidentally wounded by a poisoned arrow the only cure is immediate excision of the part.
I do not wonder that the Government has prohibited arrow-traps, for they made locomotion unsafe, and it is still unsafe a little farther north, where the hunters are more out of observation than here. The traps consist of a large bow with a poisoned arrow, fixed in such a way that when the bear walks over a cord which is attached to it he is simultaneously transfixed. I have seen as many as fifty in one house. The simple contrivance for inflicting this silent death is most ingenious.
The women are occupied all day, as I have before said. They look cheerful, and even merry when they smile, and are not like the Japanese, prematurely old, partly perhaps because their houses are well ventilated, and the use of charcoal is unknown. I do not think that they undergo the unmitigated drudgery which falls to the lot of most savage women, though they work hard. The men do not like them to speak to strangers, however, and say that their place is to work and rear children. They eat of the same food, and at the same time as the men, laugh and talk before them, and receive equal support and respect in old age. They sell mats and bark-cloth in the piece, and made up, when they can, and their husbands do not take their earnings from them. All Aino women understand the making of bark-cloth. The men bring in the bark in strips, five feet long, having removed the outer coating. This inner bark is easily separated into several thin layers, which are split into very narrow strips by the older women, very neatly knotted, and wound into balls weighing about a pound each. No preparation of either the bark or the thread is required to fit it for weaving, but I observe that some of the women steep it in a decoction of a bark which produces a brown dye to deepen the buff tint.
The loom is so simple that I almost fear to represent it as complicated by description. It consists of a stout hook fixed in the floor, to which the threads of the far end of the web are secured, a cord fastening the near end to the waist of the worker, who supplies, by dexterous rigidity, the necessary tension; a frame like a comb resting on the ankles, through which the threads pass, a hollow roll for keeping the upper and under threads separate, a spatula-shaped shuttle of engraved wood, and a roller on which the cloth is rolled as it is made. The length of the web is fifteen feet, and the width of the cloth fifteen inches. It is woven with great regularity, and the knots in the thread are carefully kept on the under side. 20 It is a very slow and fatiguing process, and a woman cannot do much more than a foot a day. The weaver sits on the floor with the whole arrangement attached to her waist, and the loom, if such it may be called, on her ankles. It takes long practice before she can supply the necessary tension by spinal rigidity. As the work proceeds she drags herself almost imperceptibly nearer the hook. In this house and other large ones two or three women bring in their webs in the morning, fix their hooks, and weave all day, while others, who have not equal advantages, put their hooks in the ground and weave in the sunshine. The web and loom can be bundled up in two minutes, and carried away quite as easily as a knitted soft blanket. It is the simplest and perhaps the most primitive form of hand-loom, and comb, shuttle, and roll, are all easily fashioned with an ordinary knife.
20 I have not been able to obtain from any botanist the name of the tree from the bark of which the thread is made, but suppose it to be a species of Tiliaceae.
Letter 37—(Continued)
A Simple Nature–Worship — Aino Gods — A Festival Song — Religious Intoxication — Bear–Worship — The Annual Saturnalia — The Future State — Marriage and Divorce — Musical Instruments — Etiquette — The Chieftainship — Death and Burial — Old Age — Moral Qualities.
There cannot be anything more vague and destitute of cohesion than Aino religious notions. With the exception of the hill shrines of Japanese construction dedicated to Yoshitsune, they have no temples, and they have neither priests, sacrifices, nor worship. Apparently through all traditional time their cultus has been the rudest and most primitive form of nature-worship, the attaching of a vague sacredness to trees, rivers, rocks, and mountains, and of vague notions of power for good or evil to the sea, the forest, the fire, and the sun and moon. I cannot make out that they possess a trace of the deification of ancestors, though their rude nature worship may well have been the primitive form of Japanese Shinto. The solitary exception to their adoration of animate and inanimate nature appears to be the reverence paid to Yoshitsune, to whom they believe they are greatly indebted, and who, it is supposed by some, will yet interfere on their behalf. 21 Their gods — that is, the outward symbols of their religion, corresponding most likely with the Shinto gohei — are wands and posts of peeled wood, whittled nearly to the top, from which the pendent shavings fall down in white curls. These are not only set up in their houses, sometimes to the number of twenty, but on precipices, banks of rivers and streams, and mountain-passes, and such wands are thrown into the rivers as the boatmen descend rapids and dangerous places. Since my baggage horse fell over an acclivity on the trail from Sarufuto, four such wands have been placed there. It is nonsense to write of the religious ideas of a people who have none, and of beliefs among people who are merely adult children. The traveller who formulates an Aino creed must “evolve it from his inner consciousness.” I have taken infinite trouble to learn from themselves what their religious notions are, and Shinondi tells me that they have told me all they know, and the whole sum is a few vague fears and hopes, and a suspicion that there are things outside themselves more powerful than themselves, whose good influences may be obtained, or whose evil influences may be averted, by libations of sake.
The word worship is in itself misleading. When I use it of these savages it simply means libations of sake, waving bowls and waving hands, without any spiritual act of deprecation or supplication. In such a sense and such alone they worship the sun and moon (but not the stars), the forest, and the sea. The wolf, the black snake, the owl, and several other beasts and birds have the word kamoi, god, attached to them, as the wolf is the “howling god,” the owl “the bird of the gods,” a black snake the “raven god;” but none of these things are now “worshipped,” wolf-worship having quite lately died out. Thunder, “the voice of the gods,” inspires some fear. The sun, they say, is their best god, and the fire their next best, obviously the divinities from whom their greatest benefits are received. Some idea of gratitude pervades their rude notions, as in the case of the “worship” paid to Yoshitsune, and it appears in one of the rude recitations chanted at the Saturnalia which in several places conclude the hunting and fishing seasons:-
“To the sea which nourishes us, to the forest which protects us, we present our grateful thanks. You are two mothers that nourish the same child; do not be angry if we leave one to go to the other.
“The Ainos will always be the pride of the forest and of the sea.”
The solitary act of sacrifice which they perform is the placing of a worthless, dead bird, something like a sparrow, near one of their peeled wands, where it is left till it reaches an advanced stage of putrefaction. “To drink for the god” is the chief act of “worship,” and thus drunkenness and religion are inseparably connected, as the more sake the Ainos drink the more devout they are, and the better pleased are the gods. It does not appear that anything but sake is of sufficient value to please the gods. The libations to the fire and the peeled post are never omitted, and are always accompanied by the inward waving of the sake bowls.
The peculiarity which distinguishes this rude mythology is the “worship” of the bear, the Yezo bear being one of the finest of his species; but it is impossible to understand the feelings by which it is prompted, for they worship it after their fashion, and set up its head in their villages, yet they trap it, kill it, eat it, and sell its skin. There is no doubt that this wild beast inspires more of the feeling which prompts worship than the inanimate forces of nature, and the Ainos may be distinguished as bear-worshippers, and their greatest religious festival or Saturnalia as the Festival of the Bear. Gentle and peaceable as they are, they have a great admiration for fierceness and courage; and the bear, which is the strongest, fiercest, and most courageous animal known to them, has probably in all ages inspired them with veneration. Some of their rude chants are in praise of the bear, and their highest eulogy on a man is to compare him to a bear. Thus Shinondi said of Benri, the chief, “He is as strong as a bear,” and the old Fate praising Pipichari called him “The young bear.”
In all Aino villages, specially near the chief’s house, there are several tall poles with the fleshless skull of a bear on the top of each, and in most there is also a large cage, made grid-iron fashion, of stout timbers, and raised two or three feet from the ground. At the present time such cages contain young but well-grown bears, captured when quite small in the early spring. After the capture the bear cub is introduced into a dwelling-house, generally that of the chief, or sub-chief, where it is suckled by a woman, and played with by the children, till it grows too big and rough for domestic ways, and is placed in a strong cage, in which it is fed and cared for, as I understand, till the autumn of the following year, when, being strong and well-grown, the Festival of the Bear is celebrated. The customs of this festival vary considerably, and the manner of the bear’s death differs among the mountain and coast Ainos, but everywhere there is a general gathering of the people, and it is the occasion of a great feast, accompanied with much sake and a curious dance, in which men alone take part.
Yells and shouts are used to excite the bear, and when he becomes much agitated a chief shoots him with an arrow, inflicting a slight wound which maddens him, on which the bars of the cage are raised, and he springs forth, very furious. At this stage the Ainos run upon him with various weapons, each one striving to inflict a wound, as it brings good luck to draw his blood. As soon as he falls down exhausted, his head is cut off, and the weapons with which he has been wounded are offered to it, and he is asked to avenge himself upon them. Afterwards the carcass, amidst a frenzied uproar, is distributed among the people, and amidst feasting and riot the head, placed upon a pole, is worshipped, i.e. it receives libations of sake, and the festival closes with general intoxication. In some villages it is customary for the foster-mother of the bear to utter piercing wails while he is delivered to his murderers, and after he is slain to beat each one of them with a branch of a tree. [Afterwards at Usu, on Volcano Bay, the old men told me that at their festival they despatch the bear after a different manner. on letting it loose from the cage two men seize it by the ears, and others simultaneously place a long, stout pole across the nape of its neck, upon which a number of Ainos mount, and after a prolonged struggle the neck is broken. As the bear is seen to approach his end, they shout in chorus, “We kill you, O bear! come back soon into an Aino.”] When a bear is trapped or wounded by an arrow, the hunters go through an apologetic or propitiatory ceremony. They appear to have certain rude ideas of metempsychosis, as is evidenced by the Usu prayer to the bear and certain rude traditions; but whether these are indigenous, or have arisen by contact with Buddhism at a later period, it is impossible to say.
They have no definite ideas concerning a future state, and the subject is evidently not a pleasing one to them. Such notions as they have are few and confused. Some think that the spirits of their friends go into wolves and snakes; others, that they wander about the forests; and they are much afraid of ghosts. A few think that they go to “a good or bad place,” according to their deeds; but Shinondi said, and there was an infinite pathos in his words, “How can we know? No one ever came back to tell us!” on asking him what were bad deeds, he said, “Being bad to parents, stealing, and telling lies.” The future, however, does not occupy any place in their thoughts, and they can hardly be said to believe in the immortality of the soul, though their fear of ghosts shows that they recognise a distinction between body and spirit.
Their social customs are very simple. Girls never marry before the age of seventeen, or men before twenty-one. When a man wishes to marry he thinks of some particular girl, and asks the chief if he may ask for her. If leave is given, either through a “go-between” or personally, he asks her father for her, and if he consents the bridegroom gives him a present, usually a Japanese “curio.” This constitutes betrothal, and the marriage, which immediately follows, is celebrated by carousals and the drinking of much sake. The bride receives as her dowry her earrings and a highly ornamented kimono. It is an essential that the husband provides a house to which to take his wife. Each couple lives separately, and even the eldest son does not take his bride to his father’s house. Polygamy is only allowed in two cases. The chief may have three wives; but each must have her separate house. Benri has two wives; but it appears that he took the second because the first was childless. [The Usu Ainos told me that among the tribes of Volcano Bay polygamy is not practised, even by the chiefs.] It is also permitted in the case of a childless wife; but there is no instance of it in Biratori, and the men say that they prefer to have one wife, as two quarrel.
Widows are allowed to marry again with the chief’s consent; but among these mountain Ainos a woman must remain absolutely secluded within the house of her late husband for a period varying from six to twelve months, only going to the door at intervals to throw sake to the right and left. A man secludes himself similarly for thirty days. [So greatly do the customs vary, that round Volcano Bay I found that the period of seclusion for a widow is only thirty days, and for a man twenty-five; but that after a father’s death the house in which he has lived is burned down after the thirty days of seclusion, and the widow and her children go to a friend’s house for three years, after which the house is rebuilt on its former site.]
If a man does not like his wife, by obtaining the chief’s consent he can divorce her; but he must send her back to her parents with plenty of good clothes; but divorce is impracticable where there are children, and is rarely if ever practised. Conjugal fidelity is a virtue among Aino women; but “custom” provides that, in case of unfaithfulness, the injured husband may bestow his wife upon her paramour, if he be an unmarried man; in which case the chief fixes the amount of damages which the paramour must pay; and these are usually valuable Japanese curios.
The old and blind people are entirely supported by their children, and receive until their dying day filial reverence and obedience.
If one man steals from another he must return what he has taken, and give the injured man a present besides, the value of which is fixed by the chief.
Their mode of living you already know, as I have shared it, and am still receiving their hospitality. “Custom” enjoins the exercise of hospitality on every Aino. They receive all strangers as they received me, giving them of their best, placing them in the most honourable place, bestowing gifts upon them, and, when they depart, furnishing them with cakes of boiled millet.
They have few amusements, except certain feasts. Their dance, which they have just given in my honour, is slow and mournful, and their songs are chants or recitative. They have a musical instrument, something like a guitar, with three, five, or six strings, which are made from sinews of whales cast up on the shore. They have another, which is believed to be peculiar to themselves, consisting of a thin piece of wood, about five inches long and two and a half inches broad, with a pointed wooden tongue, about two lines in breadth and sixteen in length, fixed in the middle, and grooved on three sides. The wood is held before the mouth, and the tongue is set in motion by the vibration of the breath in singing. Its sound, though less penetrating, is as discordant as that of a Jew’s harp, which it somewhat resembles. one of the men used it as an accompaniment of a song; but they are unwilling to part with them, as they say that it is very seldom that they can find a piece of wood which will bear the fine splitting necessary for the tongue.
They are a most courteous people among each other. The salutations are frequent — on entering a house, on leaving it, on meeting on the road, on receiving anything from the hand of another, and on receiving a kind or complimentary speech. They do not make any acknowledgments of this kind to the women, however. The common salutation consists in extending the hands and waving them inwards, once or oftener, and stroking the beard; the formal one in raising the hands with an inward curve to the level of the head two or three times, lowering them, and rubbing them together; the ceremony concluding with stroking the beard several times. The latter and more formal mode of salutation is offered to the chief, and by the young to the old men. The women have no “manners!”
They have no “medicine men,” and, though they are aware of the existence of healing herbs, they do not know their special virtues or the manner of using them. Dried and pounded bear’s liver is their specific, and they place much reliance on it in colic and other pains. They are a healthy race. In this village of 300 souls, there are no chronically ailing people; nothing but one case of bronchitis, and some cutaneous maladies among children. Neither is there any case of deformity in this and five other large villages which I have visited, except that of a girl, who has one leg slightly shorter than the other.
They ferment a kind of intoxicating liquor from the root of a tree, and also from their own millet and Japanese rice, but Japanese sake is the one thing that they care about. They spend all their gains upon it, and drink it in enormous quantities. It represents to them all the good of which they know, or can conceive. Beastly intoxication is the highest happiness to which these poor savages aspire, and the condition is sanctified to them under the fiction of “drinking to the gods.” Men and women alike indulge in this vice. A few, however, like Pipichari, abstain from it totally, taking the bowl in their hands, making the libations to the gods, and then passing it on. I asked Pipichari why he did not take sake, and he replied with a truthful terseness, “Because it makes men like dogs.”
Except the chief, who has two horses, they have no domestic animals except very large, yellow dogs, which are used in hunting, but are never admitted within the houses.
The habits of the people, though by no means destitute of decency and propriety, are not cleanly. The women bathe their hands once a day, but any other washing is unknown. They never wash their clothes, and wear the same by day and night. I am afraid to speculate on the condition of their wealth of coal-black hair. They may be said to be very dirty — as dirty fully as masses of our people at home. Their houses swarm with fleas, but they are not worse in this respect than the Japanese yadoyas. The mountain villages have, however, the appearance of extreme cleanliness, being devoid of litter, heaps, puddles, and untidiness of all kinds, and there are no unpleasant odours inside or outside the houses, as they are well ventilated and smoked, and the salt fish and meat are kept in the godowns. The hair and beards of the old men, instead of being snowy as they ought to be, are yellow from smoke and dirt.
They have no mode of computing time, and do not know their own ages. To them the past is dead, yet, like other conquered and despised races, they cling to the idea that in some far-off age they were a great nation. They have no traditions of internecine strife, and the art of war seems to have been lost long ago. I asked Benri about this matter, and he says that formerly Ainos fought with spears and knives as well as with bows and arrows, but that Yoshitsune, their hero god, forbade war for ever, and since then the two-edged spear, with a shaft nine feet long, has only been used in hunting bears.
The Japanese Government, of course, exercises the same authority over the Ainos as over its other subjects, but probably it does not care to interfere in domestic or tribal matters, and within this outside limit despotic authority is vested in the chiefs. The Ainos live in village communities, and each community has its own chief, who is its lord paramount. It appears to me that this chieftainship is but an expansion of the paternal relation, and that all the village families are ruled as a unit. Benri, in whose house I am, is the chief of Biratori, and is treated by all with very great deference of manner. The office is nominally for life; but if a chief becomes blind, or too infirm to go about, he appoints a successor. If he has a “smart” son, who he thinks will command the respect of the people, he appoints him; but if not, he chooses the most suitable man in the village. The people are called upon to approve the choice, but their ratification is never refused. The office is not hereditary anywhere.
Benri appears to exercise the authority of a very strict father. His manner to all the men is like that of a master to slaves, and they bow when they speak to him. No one can marry without his approval. If any one builds a house he chooses the site. He has absolute jurisdiction in civil and criminal cases, unless (which is very rare) the latter should be of sufficient magnitude to be reported to the Imperial officials. He compels restitution of stolen property, and in all cases fixes the fines which are to be paid by delinquents. He also fixes the hunting arrangements and the festivals. The younger men were obviously much afraid of incurring his anger in his absence.
An eldest son does not appear to be, as among the Japanese, a privileged person. He does not necessarily inherit the house and curios. The latter are not divided, but go with the house to the son whom the father regards as being the “smartest.” Formal adoption is practised. Pipichari is an adopted son, and is likely to succeed to Benri’s property to the exclusion of his own children. I cannot get at the word which is translated “smartness,” but I understand it as meaning general capacity. The chief, as I have mentioned before, is allowed three wives among the mountain Ainos, otherwise authority seems to be his only privilege.
The Ainos have a singular dread of snakes. Even their bravest fly from them. one man says that it is because they know of no cure for their bite; but there is something more than this, for they flee from snakes which they know to be harmless.
They have an equal dread of their dead. Death seems to them very specially “the shadow fear’d of man.” When it comes, which it usually does from bronchitis in old age, the corpse is dressed in its best clothing, and laid upon a shelf for from one to three days. In the case of a woman her ornaments are buried with her, and in that of a man his knife and sake-stick, and, if he were a smoker, his smoking apparatus. The corpse is sewn up with these things in a mat, and, being slung on poles, is carried to a solitary grave, where it is laid in a recumbent position. Nothing will induce an Aino to go near a grave. Even if a valuable bird or animal falls near one, he will not go to pick it up. A vague dread is for ever associated with the departed, and no dream of Paradise ever lights for the Aino the “Stygian shades.”
Benri is, for an Aino, intelligent. Two years ago Mr. Dening of Hakodate came up here and told him that there was but one God who made us all, to which the shrewd old man replied, “If the God who made you made us, how is it that you are so different — you so rich, we so poor?” on asking him about the magnificent pieces of lacquer and inlaying which adorn his curio shelf, he said that they were his father’s, grandfather’s, and great-grandfather’s at least, and he thinks they were gifts from the daimiyo of Matsumae soon after the conquest of Yezo. He is a grand-looking man, in spite of the havoc wrought by his intemperate habits. There is plenty of room in the house, and this morning, when I asked him to show me the use of the spear, he looked a truly magnificent savage, stepping well back with the spear in rest, and then springing forward for the attack, his arms and legs turning into iron, the big muscles standing out in knots, his frame quivering with excitement, the thick hair falling back in masses from his brow, and the fire of the chase in his eye. I trembled for my boy, who was the object of the imaginary onslaught, the passion of sport was so admirably acted.
As I write, seven of the older men are sitting by the fire. Their grey beards fall to their waists in rippled masses, and the slight baldness of age not only gives them a singularly venerable appearance, but enhances the beauty of their lofty brows. I took a rough sketch of one of the handsomest, and, showing it to him, asked if he would have it, but instead of being amused or pleased he showed symptoms of fear, and asked me to burn it, saying it would bring him bad luck and he should die. However, Ito pacified him, and he accepted it, after a Chinese character, which is understood to mean good luck, had been written upon it; but all the others begged me not to “make pictures” of them, except Pipichari, who lies at my feet like a staghound.
The profusion of black hair, and a curious intensity about their eyes, coupled with the hairy limbs and singularly vigorous physique, give them a formidably savage appearance; but the smile, full of “sweetness and light,” in which both eyes and mouth bear part, and the low, musical voice, softer and sweeter than anything I have previously heard, make me at times forget that they are savages at all. The venerable look of these old men harmonises with the singular dignity and courtesy of their manners, but as I look at the grand heads, and reflect that the Ainos have never shown any capacity, and are merely adult children, they seem to suggest water on the brain rather than intellect. I am more and more convinced that the ｅxpression of their faces is European. It is truthful, straightforward, manly, but both it and the tone of voice are strongly tinged with pathos.
Before these elders Benri asked me, in a severe tone, if I had been annoyed in any way during his absence. He feared, he said, that the young men and the women would crowd about me rudely. I made a complimentary speech in return, and all the ancient hands were waved, and the venerable beards were stroked in acknowledgment.
These Ainos, doubtless, stand high among uncivilised peoples. They are, however, as completely irreclaimable as the wildest of nomad tribes, and contact with civilisation, where it exists, only debases them. Several young Ainos were sent to Tokiyo, and educated and trained in various ways, but as soon as they returned to Yezo they relapsed into savagery, retaining nothing but a knowledge of Japanese. They are charming in many ways, but make one sad, too, by their stupidity, apathy, and hopelessness, and all the sadder that their numbers appear to be again increasing; and as their physique is very fine, there does not appear to be a prospect of the race dying out at present.
They are certainly superior to many aborigines, as they have an approach to domestic life. They have one word for HOUSE, and another for HOME, and one word for husband approaches very nearly to house-band. Truth is of value in their eyes, and this in itself raises them above some peoples. Infanticide is unknown, and aged parents receive filial reverence, kindness, and support, while in their social and domestic relations there is much that is praiseworthy.
I must conclude this letter abruptly, as the horses are waiting, and I must cross the rivers, if possible, before the bursting of an impending storm.
I. L. B.
21 Yoshitsune is the most popular hero of Japanese history, and the special favourite of boys. He was the brother of Yoritomo, who was appointed by the Mikado in 1192 Sei-i Tai Shogun (barbarian-subjugating great general) for his victories, and was the first of that series of great Shoguns whom our European notions distorted into “Temporal Emperors” of Japan. Yoshitsune, to whom the real honour of these victories belonged, became the object of the jealousy and hatred of his brother, and was hunted from province to province, till, according to popular belief, he committed hara-kiri, after killing his wife and children, and his head, preserved in sake, was sent to his brother at Kamakura. Scholars, however, are not agreed as to the manner, period, or scene of his death. Many believe that he escaped to Yezo and lived among the Ainos for many years, dying among them at the close of the twelfth century. None believe this more firmly than the Ainos themselves, who assert that he taught their fathers the arts of civilisation, with letters and numbers, and gave them righteous laws, and he is worshipped by many of them under a name which signifies Master of the Law. I have been told by old men in Biratori, Usu, and Lebunge, that a later Japanese conqueror carried away the books in which the arts were written, and that since his time the arts themselves have been lost, and the Ainos have fallen into their present condition! on asking why the Ainos do not make vessels of iron and clay as well as knives and spears, the invariable answer is, “The Japanese took away the books.”
Letter 38
A Parting Gift — A Delicacy — Generosity — A Seaside Village — Pipichari’s Advice — A Drunken Revel — Ito’s Prophecies — The Kocho’s Illness — Patent Medicines.
SARUFUTO, YEZO, August 27.
I left the Ainos yesterday with real regret, though I must confess that sleeping in one’s clothes and the lack of ablutions are very fatiguing. Benri’s two wives spent the early morning in the laborious operation of grinding millet into coarse flour, and before I departed, as their custom is, they made a paste of it, rolled it with their unclean fingers into well-shaped cakes, boiled them in the unwashed pot in which they make their stew of “abominable things,” and presented them to me on a lacquer tray. They were distressed that I did not eat their food, and a woman went to a village at some distance and brought me some venison fat as a delicacy. All those of whom I had seen much came to wish me good-bye, and they brought so many presents (including a fine bearskin) that I should have needed an additional horse to carry them had I accepted but one-half.
I rode twelve miles through the forest to Mombets, where I intended to spend Sunday, but I had the worst horse I ever rode, and we took five hours. The day was dull and sad, threatening a storm, and when we got out of the forest, upon a sand-hill covered with oak scrub, we encountered a most furious wind. Among the many views which I have seen, that is one to be remembered. Below lay a bleached and bare sand-hill, with a few grey houses huddled in its miserable shelter, and a heaped-up shore of grey sand, on which a brown-grey sea was breaking with clash and boom in long, white, ragged lines, with all beyond a confusion of surf, surge, and mist, with driving brown clouds mingling sea and sky, and all between showing only in glimpses amidst scuds of sand.
At a house in the scrub a number of men were drinking sake with much uproar, and a superb-looking Aino came out, staggered a few yards, and then fell backwards among the weeds, a picture of debasement. I forgot to tell you that before I left Biratori, I inveighed to the assembled Ainos against the practice and consequences of sake-drinking, and was met with the reply, “We must drink to the gods, or we shall die;” but Pipichari said, “You say that which is good; let us give sake to the gods, but not drink it,” for which bold speech he was severely rebuked by Benri.
Mombets is a stormily-situated and most wretched cluster of twenty-seven decayed houses, some of them Aino, and some Japanese. The fish-oil and seaweed fishing trades are in brisk operation there now for a short time, and a number of Aino and Japanese strangers are employed. The boats could not get out because of the surf, and there was a drunken debauch. The whole place smelt of sake. Tipsy men were staggering about and falling flat on their backs, to lie there like dogs till they were sober — Aino women were vainly endeavouring to drag their drunken lords home, and men of both races were reduced to a beastly equality. I went to the yadoya where I intended to spend Sunday, but, besides being very dirty and forlorn, it was the very centre of the sake traffic, and in its open space there were men in all stages of riotous and stupid intoxication. It was a sad scene, yet one to be matched in a hundred places in Scotland every Saturday afternoon. I am told by the Kocho here that an Aino can drink four or five times as much as a Japanese without being tipsy, so for each tipsy Aino there had been an outlay of 6s. or 7s., for sake is 8d. a cup here!
I had some tea and eggs in the daidokoro, and altered my plans altogether on finding that if I proceeded farther round the east coast, as I intended, I should run the risk of several days’ detention on the banks of numerous “bad rivers” if rain came on, by which I should run the risk of breaking my promise to deliver Ito to Mr. Maries by a given day. I do not surrender this project, however, without an equivalent, for I intend to add 100 miles to my journey, by taking an almost disused track round Volcano Bay, and visiting the coast Ainos of a very primitive region. Ito is very much opposed to this, thinking that he has made a sufficient sacrifice of personal comfort at Biratori, and plies me with stories, such as that there are “many bad rivers to cross,” that the track is so worn as to be impassable, that there are no yadoyas, and that at the Government offices we shall neither get rice nor eggs! An old man who has turned back unable to get horses is made responsible for these stories. The machinations are very amusing. Ito was much smitten with the daughter of the house-master at Mororan, and left some things in her keeping, and the desire to see her again is at the bottom of his opposition to the other route.
Monday. — The horse could not or would not carry me farther than Mombets, so, sending the baggage on, I walked through the oak wood, and enjoyed its silent solitude, in spite of the sad reflections upon the enslavement of the Ainos to sake. I spent yesterday quietly in my old quarters, with a fearful storm of wind and rain outside. Pipichari appeared at noon, nominally to bring news of the sick woman, who is recovering, and to have his nearly healed foot bandaged again, but really to bring me a knife sheath which he has carved for me. He lay on the mat in the corner of my room most of the afternoon, and I got a great many more words from him. The house-master, who is the Kocho of Sarufuto, paid me a courteous visit, and in the evening sent to say that he would be very glad of some medicine, for he was “very ill and going to have fever.” He had caught a bad cold and sore throat, had bad pains in his limbs, and was bemoaning himself ruefully. To pacify his wife, who was very sorry for him, I gave him some “Cockle’s Pills” and the trapper’s remedy of “a pint of hot water with a pinch of cayenne pepper,” and left him moaning and bundled up under a pile of futons, in a nearly hermetically sealed room, with a hibachi of charcoal vitiating the air. This morning when I went and inquired after him in a properly concerned tone, his wife told me very gleefully that he was quite well and had gone out, and had left 25 sen for some more of the medicines that I had given him, so with great gravity I put up some of Duncan and Flockhart’s most pungent cayenne pepper, and showed her how much to use. She was not content, however, without some of the “Cockles,” a single box of which has performed six of those “miraculous cures” which rejoice the hearts and fill the pockets of patent medicine makers!
I. L. B.
Letter 39
A Welcome Gift — Recent Changes — Volcanic Phenomena — Interesting Tufa Cones — Semi-strangulation — A Fall into a Bear-trap — The Shiraoi Ainos — Horsebreaking and Cruelty.
OLD MORORAN, VOLCANO BAY, YEZO, September 2.
After the storm of Sunday, Monday was a grey, still, tender day, and the ranges of wooded hills were bathed in the richest indigo colouring. A canter of seventeen miles among the damask roses on a very rough horse only took me to Yubets, whose indescribable loneliness fascinated me into spending a night there again, and encountering a wild clatter of wind and rain; and another canter of seven miles the next morning took me to Tomakomai, where I rejoined my kuruma, and after a long delay, three trotting Ainos took me to Shiraoi, where the “clear shining after rain,” and the mountains against a lemon-coloured sky, were extremely beautiful; but the Pacific was as unrestful as a guilty thing, and its crash and clamour and the severe cold fatigued me so much that I did not pursue my journey the next day, and had the pleasure of a flying visit from Mr. Von Siebold and Count Diesbach, who bestowed a chicken upon me.
I like Shiraoi very much, and if I were stronger would certainly make it a basis for exploring a part of the interior, in which there is much to reward the explorer. Obviously the changes in this part of Yezo have been comparatively recent, and the energy of the force which has produced them is not yet extinct. The land has gained from the sea along the whole of this part of the coast to the extent of two or three miles, the old beach with its bays and headlands being a marked feature of the landscape. This new formation appears to be a vast bed of pumice, covered by a thin layer of vegetable mould, which cannot be more than fifty years old. This pumice fell during the eruption of the volcano of Tarumai, which is very near Shiraoi, and is also brought down in large quantities from the interior hills and valleys by the numerous rivers, besides being washed up by the sea. At the last eruption pumice fell over this region of Yezo to a medium depth of 3 feet 6 inches. In nearly all the rivers good sections of the formation may be seen in their deeply-cleft banks, broad, light-coloured bands of pumice, with a few inches of rich, black, vegetable soil above, and several feet of black sea-sand below. During a freshet which occurred the first night I was at Shiraoi, a single stream covered a piece of land with pumice to the depth of nine inches, being the wash from the hills of the interior, in a course of less than fifteen miles.
Looking inland, the volcano of Tarumai, with a bare grey top and a blasted forest on its sides, occupies the right of the picture. To the left and inland are mountains within mountains, tumbled together in most picturesque confusion, densely covered with forest and cleft by magnificent ravines, here and there opening out into narrow valleys. The whole of the interior is jungle penetrable for a few miles by shallow and rapid rivers, and by nearly smothered trails made by the Ainos in search of game. The general lie of the country made me very anxious to find out whether a much-broken ridge lying among the mountains is or is not a series of tufa cones of ancient date; and, applying for a good horse and Aino guide on horseback, I left Ito to amuse himself, and spent much of a most splendid day in investigations and in attempting to get round the back of the volcano and up its inland side. There is a great deal to see and learn there. Oh that I had strength! After hours of most tedious and exhausting work I reached a point where there were several great fissures emitting smoke and steam, with occasional subterranean detonations. These were on the side of a small, flank crack which was smoking heavily. There was light pumice everywhere, but nothing like recent lava or scoriae. one fissure was completely lined with exquisite, acicular crystals of sulphur, which perished with a touch. Lower down there were two hot springs with a deposit of sulphur round their margins, and bubbles of gas, which, from its strong, garlicky smell, I suppose to be sulphuretted hydrogen. Farther progress in that direction was impossible without a force of pioneers. I put my arm down several deep crevices which were at an altitude of only about 500 feet, and had to withdraw it at once, owing to the great heat, in which some beautiful specimens of tropical ferns were growing. At the same height I came to a hot spring — hot enough to burst one of my thermometers, which was graduated above the boiling point of Fahrenheit; and tying up an egg in a pocket-handkerchief and holding it by a stick in the water, it was hard boiled in 8.5 minutes. The water evaporated without leaving a trace of deposit on the handkerchief, and there was no crust round its margin. It boiled and bubbled with great force.
Three hours more of exhausting toil, which almost knocked up the horses, brought us to the apparent ridge, and I was delighted to find that it consisted of a lateral range of tufa cones, which I estimate as being from 200 to 350, or even 400 feet high. They are densely covered with trees of considerable age, and a rich deposit of mould; but their conical form is still admirably defined. An hour of very severe work, and energetic use of the knife on the part of the Aino, took me to the top of one of these through a mass of entangled and gigantic vegetation, and I was amply repaid by finding a deep, well-defined crateriform cavity of great depth, with its sides richly clothed with vegetation, closely resembling some of the old cones in the island of Kauai. This cone is partially girdled by a stream, which in one place has cut through a bank of both red and black volcanic ash. All the usual phenomena of volcanic regions are probably to be met with north of Shiraoi, and I hope they will at some future time be made the object of careful investigation.
In spite of the desperate and almost overwhelming fatigue, I have enjoyed few things more than that “exploring expedition.” If the Japanese have no one to talk to they croon hideous discords to themselves, and it was a relief to leave Ito behind and get away with an Aino, who was at once silent, trustworthy, and faithful. Two bright rivers bubbling over beds of red pebbles run down to Shiraoi out of the back country, and my directions, which were translated to the Aino, were to follow up one of these and go into the mountains in the direction of one I pointed out till I said “Shiraoi.” It was one of those exquisite mornings which are seen sometimes in the Scotch Highlands before rain, with intense clearness and visibility, a blue atmosphere, a cloudless sky, blue summits, heavy dew, and glorious sunshine, and under these circumstances scenery beautiful in itself became entrancing.
The trailers are so formidable that we had to stoop over our horses’ necks at all times, and with pushing back branches and guarding my face from slaps and scratches, my thick dogskin gloves were literally frayed off, and some of the skin of my hands and face in addition, so that I returned with both bleeding and swelled. It was on the return ride, fortunately, that in stooping to escape one great liana the loop of another grazed my nose, and, being unable to check my unbroken horse instantaneously, the loop caught me by the throat, nearly strangled me, and in less time than it takes to tell it I was drawn over the back of the saddle, and found myself lying on the ground, jammed between a tree and the hind leg of the horse, which was quietly feeding. The Aino, whose face was very badly scratched, missing me, came back, said never a word, helped me up, brought me some water in a leaf, brought my hat, and we rode on again. I was little the worse for the fall, but on borrowing a looking-glass I see not only scratches and abrasions all over my face, but a livid mark round my throat as if I had been hung! The Aino left portions of his bushy locks on many of the branches. You would have been amused to see me in this forest, preceded by this hairy and formidable-looking savage, who was dressed in a coat of skins with the fur outside, seated on the top of a pack-saddle covered with a deer hide, and with his hairy legs crossed over the horse’s neck — a fashion in which the Ainos ride any horses over any ground with the utmost serenity.
It was a wonderful region for beauty. I have not seen so beautiful a view in Japan as from the river-bed from which I had the first near view of the grand assemblage of tufa cones, covered with an ancient vegetation, backed by high mountains of volcanic origin, on whose ragged crests the red ash was blazing vermilion against the blue sky, with a foreground of bright waters flashing through a primeval forest. The banks of these streams were deeply excavated by the heavy rains, and sometimes we had to jump three and even four feet out of the forest into the river, and as much up again, fording the Shiraoi river only more than twenty times, and often making a pathway of its treacherous bed and rushing waters, because the forest was impassable from the great size of the prostrate trees. The horses look at these jumps, hold back, try to turn, and then, making up their minds, suddenly plunge down or up. When the last vestige of a trail disappeared, I signed to the Aino to go on, and our subsequent “exploration” was all done at the rate of about a mile an hour. on the openings the grass grows stiff and strong to the height of eight feet, with its soft reddish plumes waving in the breeze. The Aino first forced his horse through it, but of course it closed again, so that constantly when he was close in front I was only aware of his proximity by the tinkling of his horse’s bells, for I saw nothing of him or of my own horse except the horn of my saddle. We tumbled into holes often, and as easily tumbled out of them; but once we both went down in the most unexpected manner into what must have been an old bear-trap, both going over our horses’ heads, the horses and ourselves struggling together in a narrow space in a mist of grassy plumes, and, being unable to communicate with my guide, the sense of the ridiculous situation was so overpowering that, even in the midst of the mishap, I was exhausted with laughter, though not a little bruised. It was very hard to get out of that pitfall, and I hope I shall never get into one again. It is not the first occasion on which I have been glad that the Yezo horses are shoeless. It was through this long grass that we fought our way to the tufa cones, with the red ragged crests against the blue sky.
The scenery was magnificent, and after getting so far I longed to explore the sources of the rivers, but besides the many difficulties the day was far spent. I was also too weak for any energetic undertaking, yet I felt an intuitive perception of the passion and fascination of exploring, and understood how people could give up their lives to it. I turned away from the tufa cones and the glory of the ragged crests very sadly, to ride a tired horse through great difficulties; and the animal was so thoroughly done up that I had to walk, or rather wade, for the last hour, and it was nightfall when I returned, to find that Ito had packed up all my things, had been waiting ever since noon to start for Horobets, was very grumpy at having to unpack, and thoroughly disgusted when I told him that I was so tired and bruised that I should have to remain the next day to rest. He said indignantly, “I never thought that when you’d got the Kaitakushi kuruma you’d go off the road into those woods!” We had seen some deer and many pheasants, and a successful hunter brought in a fine stag, so that I had venison steak for supper, and was much comforted, though Ito seasoned the meal with well-got-up stories of the impracticability of the Volcano Bay route.
Shiraoi consists of a large old Honjin, or yadoya, where the daimiyo and his train used to lodge in the old days, and about eleven Japanese houses, most of which are sake shops — a fact which supplies an explanation of the squalor of the Aino village of fifty-two houses, which is on the shore at a respectful distance. There is no cultivation, in which it is like all the fishing villages on this part of the coast, but fish-oil and fish-manure are made in immense quantities, and, though it is not the season here, the place is pervaded by “an ancient and fish-like smell.”
The Aino houses are much smaller, poorer, and dirtier than those of Biratori. I went into a number of them, and conversed with the people, many of whom understand Japanese. Some of the houses looked like dens, and, as it was raining, husband, wife, and five or six naked children, all as dirty as they could be, with unkempt, elf-like locks, were huddled round the fires. Still, bad as it looked and smelt, the fire was the hearth, and the hearth was inviolate, and each smoked and dirt-stained group was a family, and it was an advance upon the social life of, for instance, Salt Lake City. The roofs are much flatter than those of the mountain Ainos, and, as there are few store-houses, quantities of fish, “green” skins, and venison, hang from the rafters, and the smell of these and the stinging of the smoke were most trying. Few of the houses had any guest-seats, but in the very poorest, when I asked shelter from the rain, they put their best mat upon the ground, and insisted, much to my distress, on my walking over it in muddy boots, saying, “It is Aino custom.” Ever, in those squalid homes the broad shelf, with its rows of Japanese curios, always has a place. I mentioned that it is customary for a chief to appoint a successor when he becomes infirm, and I came upon a case in point, through a mistaken direction, which took us to the house of the former chief, with a great empty bear cage at its door. on addressing him as the chief, he said, “I am old and blind, I cannot go out, I am of no more good,” and directed us to the house of his successor. Altogether it is obvious, from many evidences in this village, that Japanese contiguity is hurtful, and that the Ainos have reaped abundantly of the disadvantages without the advantages of contact with Japanese civilisation.
That night I saw a specimen of Japanese horse-breaking as practised in Yezo. A Japanese brought into the village street a handsome, spirited young horse, equipped with a Japanese demi-pique saddle, and a most cruel gag bit. The man wore very cruel spurs, and was armed with a bit of stout board two feet long by six inches broad. The horse had not been mounted before, and was frightened, but not the least vicious. He was spurred into a gallop, and ridden at full speed up and down the street, turned by main force, thrown on his haunches, goaded with the spurs, and cowed by being mercilessly thrashed over the ears and eyes with the piece of board till he was blinded with blood. Whenever he tried to stop from exhaustion he was spurred, jerked, and flogged, till at last, covered with sweat, foam, and blood, and with blood running from his mouth and splashing the road, he reeled, staggered, and fell, the rider dexterously disengaging himself. As soon as he was able to stand, he was allowed to crawl into a shed, where he was kept without food till morning, when a child could do anything with him. He was “broken,” effectually spirit-broken, useless for the rest of his life. It was a brutal and brutalising exhibition, as triumphs of brute force always are.
Letter 39—(Continued)
The Universal Language — The Yezo Corrals — A “Typhoon Rain”— Difficult Tracks — An Unenviable Ride — Drying Clothes — A Woman’s Remorse.
This morning I left early in the kuruma with two kind and delightful savages. The road being much broken by the rains I had to get out frequently, and every time I got in again they put my air-pillow behind me, and covered me up in a blanket; and when we got to a rough river, one made a step of his back by which I mounted their horse, and gave me nooses of rope to hold on by, and the other held my arm to keep me steady, and they would not let me walk up or down any of the hills. What a blessing it is that, amidst the confusion of tongues, the language of kindness and courtesy is universally understood, and that a kindly smile on a savage face is as intelligible as on that of one’s own countryman! They had never drawn a kuruma, and were as pleased as children when I showed them how to balance the shafts. They were not without the capacity to originate ideas, for, when they were tired of the frolic of pulling, they attached the kuruma by ropes to the horse, which one of them rode at a “scramble,” while the other merely ran in the shafts to keep them level. This is an excellent plan.
Horobets is a fishing station of antique and decayed aspect, with eighteen Japanese and forty-seven Aino houses. The latter are much larger than at Shiraoi, and their very steep roofs are beautifully constructed. It was a miserable day, with fog concealing the mountains and lying heavily on the sea, but as no one expected rain I sent the kuruma back to Mororan and secured horses. on principle I always go to the corral myself to choose animals, if possible, without sore backs, but the choice is often between one with a mere raw and others which have holes in their backs into which I could put my hand, or altogether uncovered spines. The practice does no immediate good, but by showing the Japanese that foreign opinion condemns these cruelties an amendment may eventually be brought about. At Horobets, among twenty horses, there was not one that I would take — I should like to have had them all shot. They are cheap and abundant, and are of no account. They drove a number more down from the hills, and I chose the largest and finest horse I have seen in Japan, with some spirit and action, but I soon found that he had tender feet. We shortly left the high-road, and in torrents of rain turned off on “unbeaten tracks,” which led us through a very bad swamp and some much swollen and very rough rivers into the mountains, where we followed a worn-out track for eight miles. It was literally “FOUL weather,” dark and still, with a brown mist, and rain falling in sheets. I threw my paper waterproof away as useless, my clothes were of course soaked, and it was with much difficulty that I kept my shomon and paper money from being reduced to pulp. Typhoons are not known so far north as Yezo, but it was what they call a “typhoon rain” without the typhoon, and in no time it turned the streams into torrents barely fordable, and tore up such of a road as there is, which at its best is a mere water-channel. Torrents, bringing tolerable-sized stones, tore down the track, and when the horses had been struck two or three times by these, it was with difficulty that they could be induced to face the rushing water. Constantly in a pass, the water had gradually cut a track several feet deep between steep banks, and the only possible walking place was a stony gash not wide enough for the two feet of a horse alongside of each other, down which water and stones were rushing from behind, with all manner of trailers matted overhead, and between avoiding being strangled and attempting to keep a tender-footed horse on his legs, the ride was a very severe one. The poor animal fell five times from stepping on stones, and in one of his falls twisted my left wrist badly. I thought of the many people who envied me my tour in Japan, and wondered whether they would envy me that ride!
After this had gone on for four hours, the track, with a sudden dip over a hillside, came down on Old Mororan, a village of thirty Aino and nine Japanese houses, very unpromising-looking, although exquisitely situated on the rim of a lovely cove. The Aino huts were small and poor, with an unusual number of bear skulls on poles, and the village consisted mainly of two long dilapidated buildings, in which a number of men were mending nets. It looked a decaying place, of low, mean lives. But at a “merchant’s” there was one delightful room with two translucent sides — one opening on the village, the other looking to the sea down a short, steep slope, on which is a quaint little garden, with dwarfed fir-trees in pots, a few balsams, and a red cabbage grown with much pride as a “foliage plant.”
It is nearly midnight, but my bed and bedding are so wet that I am still sitting up and drying them, patch by patch, with tedious slowness, on a wooden frame placed over a charcoal brazier, which has given my room the dryness and warmth which are needed when a person has been for many hours in soaked clothing, and has nothing really dry to put on. Ito bought a chicken for my supper, but when he was going to kill it an hour later its owner in much grief returned the money, saying she had brought it up and could not bear to see it killed. This is a wild, outlandish place, but an intuition tells me that it is beautiful. The ocean at present is thundering up the beach with the sullen force of a heavy ground-swell, and the rain is still falling in torrents.
I. L. B.
Letter 40
“More than Peace”— Geographical Difficulties — Usu-taki — Swimming the Osharu — A Dream of Beauty — A Sunset Effect — A Nocturnal Alarm — The Coast Ainos.
LEBUNGE, VOLCANO BAY, YEZO, September 6.
“Weary wave and dying blast
Sob and moan along the shore,
All is peace at last.”
And more than peace. It was a heavenly morning. The deep blue sky was perfectly unclouded, a blue sea with diamond flash and a “many-twinkling smile” rippled gently on the golden sands of the lovely little bay, and opposite, forty miles away, the pink summit of the volcano of Komono-taki, forming the south-western point of Volcano Bay, rose into a softening veil of tender blue haze. There was a balmy breeziness in the air, and tawny tints upon the hill, patches of gold in the woods, and a scarlet spray here and there heralded the glories of the advancing autumn. As the day began, so it closed. I should like to have detained each hour as it passed. It was thorough enjoyment. I visited a good many of the Mororan Ainos, saw their well-grown bear in its cage, and, tearing myself away with difficulty at noon, crossed a steep hill and a wood of scrub oak, and then followed a trail which runs on the amber sands close to the sea, crosses several small streams, and passes the lonely Aino village of Maripu, the ocean always on the left and wooded ranges on the right, and in front an apparent bar to farther progress in the volcano of Usu-taki, an imposing mountain, rising abruptly to a height of nearly 3000 feet, I should think.
In Yezo, as on the main island, one can learn very little about any prospective route. Usually when one makes an inquiry a Japanese puts on a stupid look, giggles, tucks his thumbs into his girdle, hitches up his garments, and either professes perfect ignorance or gives one some vague second-hand information, though it is quite possible that he may have been over every foot of the ground himself more than once. Whether suspicion of your motives in asking, or a fear of compromising himself by answering, is at the bottom of this I don’t know, but it is most exasperating to a traveller. In Hakodate I failed to see Captain Blakiston, who has walked round the whole Yezo sea-board, and all I was able to learn regarding this route was that the coast was thinly peopled by Ainos, that there were Government horses which could be got, and that one could sleep where one got them; that rice and salt fish were the only food; that there were many “bad rivers,” and that the road went over “bad mountains;” that the only people who went that way were Government officials twice a year, that one could not get on more than four miles a day, that the roads over the passes were “all big stones,” etc. etc. So this Usu-taki took me altogether by surprise, and for a time confounded all my carefully-constructed notions of locality. I had been told that the one volcano in the bay was Komono-taki, near Mori, and this I believed to be eighty miles off, and there, confronting me, within a distance of two miles, was this grand, splintered, vermilion-crested thing, with a far nobler aspect than that of “THE” volcano, with a curtain range in front, deeply scored, and slashed with ravines and abysses whose purple gloom was unlighted even by the noon-day sun. one of the peaks was emitting black smoke from a deep crater, another steam and white smoke from various rents and fissures in its side — vermilion peaks, smoke, and steam all rising into a sky of brilliant blue, and the atmosphere was so clear that I saw everything that was going on there quite distinctly, especially when I attained an altitude exceeding that of the curtain range. It was not for two days that I got a correct idea of its geographical situation, but I was not long in finding out that it was not Komono-taki! There is much volcanic activity about it. I saw a glare from it last night thirty miles away. The Ainos said that it was “a god,” but did not know its name, nor did the Japanese who were living under its shadow. At some distance from it in the interior rises a great dome-like mountain, Shiribetsan, and the whole view is grand.
A little beyond Mombets flows the river Osharu, one of the largest of the Yezo streams. It was much swollen by the previous day’s rain; and as the ferry-boat was carried away we had to swim it, and the swim seemed very long. Of course, we and the baggage got very wet. The coolness with which the Aino guide took to the water without giving us any notice that its broad, eddying flood was a swim, and not a ford, was very amusing.
From the top of a steepish ascent beyond the Osharugawa there is a view into what looks like a very lovely lake, with wooded promontories, and little bays, and rocky capes in miniature, and little heights, on which Aino houses, with tawny roofs, are clustered; and then the track dips suddenly, and deposits one, not by a lake at all, but on Usu Bay, an inlet of the Pacific, much broken up into coves, and with a very narrow entrance, only obvious from a few points. Just as the track touches the bay there is a road-post, with a prayer-wheel in it, and by the shore an upright stone of very large size, inscribed with Sanskrit characters, near to a stone staircase and a gateway in a massive stone-faced embankment, which looked much out of keeping with the general wildness of the place. on a rocky promontory in a wooded cove there is a large, rambling house, greatly out of repair, inhabited by a Japanese man and his son, who are placed there to look after Government interests, exiles among 500 Ainos. From among the number of rat-haunted, rambling rooms which had once been handsome, I chose one opening on a yard or garden with some distorted yews in it, but found that the great gateway and the amado had no bolts, and that anything might be appropriated by any one with dishonest intentions; but the house-master and his son, who have lived for ten years among the Ainos, and speak their language, say that nothing is ever taken, and that the Ainos are thoroughly honest and harmless. Without this assurance I should have been distrustful of the number of wide-mouthed youths who hung about, in the listlessness and vacuity of savagery, if not of the bearded men who sat or stood about the gateway with children in their arms.
Usu is a dream of beauty and peace. There is not much difference between the height of high and low water on this coast, and the lake-like illusion would have been perfect had it not been that the rocks were tinged with gold for a foot or so above the sea by a delicate species of fucus. In the exquisite inlet where I spent the night, trees and trailers drooped into the water and were mirrored in it, their green, heavy shadows lying sharp against the sunset gold and pink of the rest of the bay; log canoes, with planks laced upon their gunwales to heighten them, were drawn upon a tiny beach of golden sand, and in the shadiest cove, moored to a tree, an antique and much-carved junk was “floating double.” Wooded, rocky knolls, with Aino huts, the vermilion peaks of the volcano of Usu-taki redder than ever in the sinking sun, a few Ainos mending their nets, a few more spreading edible seaweed out to dry, a single canoe breaking the golden mirror of the cove by its noiseless motion, a few Aino loungers, with their “mild-eyed, melancholy” faces and quiet ways suiting the quiet evening scene, the unearthly sweetness of a temple bell — this was all, and yet it was the loveliest picture I have seen in Japan.
In spite of Ito’s remonstrances and his protestations that an exceptionally good supper would be spoiled, I left my rat-haunted room, with its tarnished gilding and precarious fusuma, to get the last of the pink and lemon-coloured glory, going up the staircase in the stone-faced embankment, and up a broad, well-paved avenue, to a large temple, within whose open door I sat for some time absolutely alone, and in a wonderful stillness; for the sweet-toned bell which vainly chimes for vespers amidst this bear-worshipping population had ceased. This temple was the first symptom of Japanese religion that I remember to have seen since leaving Hakodate, and worshippers have long since ebbed away from its shady and moss-grown courts. Yet it stands there to protest for the teaching of the great Hindu; and generations of Aino heathen pass away one after another; and still its bronze bell tolls, and its altar lamps are lit, and incense burns for ever before Buddha. The characters on the great bell of this temple are said to be the same lines which are often graven on temple bells, and to possess the dignity of twenty-four centuries:
“All things are transient; They being born must die, And being born are dead; And being dead are glad To be at rest.”
The temple is very handsome, the baldachino is superb, and the bronzes and brasses on the altar are specially fine. A broad ray of sunlight streamed in, crossed the matted floor, and fell full upon the figure of Sakya-muni in his golden shrine; and just at that moment a shaven priest, in silk-brocaded vestments of faded green, silently passed down the stream of light, and lit the candles on the altar, and fresh incense filled the temple with a drowsy fragrance. It was a most impressive picture. His curiosity evidently shortened his devotions, and he came and asked me where I had been and where I was going, to which, of course, I replied in excellent Japanese, and then stuck fast.
Along the paved avenue, besides the usual stone trough for holy water, there are on one side the thousand-armed Kwan-non, a very fine relief, and on the other a Buddha, throned on the eternal lotus blossom, with an iron staff, much resembling a crozier, in his hand, and that eternal apathy on his face which is the highest hope of those who hope at all. I went through a wood, where there are some mournful groups of graves on the hillside, and from the temple came the sweet sound of the great bronze bell and the beat of the big drum, and then, more faintly, the sound of the little bell and drum, with which the priest accompanies his ceaseless repetition of a phrase in the dead tongue of a distant land. There is an infinite pathos about the lonely temple in its splendour, the absence of even possible worshippers, and the large population of Ainos, sunk in yet deeper superstitions than those which go to make up popular Buddhism. I sat on a rock by the bay till the last pink glow faded from Usu-taki and the last lemon stain from the still water; and a beautiful crescent, which hung over the wooded hill, had set, and the heavens blazed with stars:
“Ten thousand stars were in the sky, Ten thousand in the sea, And every wave with dimpled face, That leapt upon the air, Had caught a star in its embrace, And held it trembling there.”
The loneliness of Usu Bay is something wonderful — a house full of empty rooms falling to decay, with only two men in it — one Japanese house among 500 savages, yet it was the only one in which I have slept in which they bolted neither the amado nor the gate. During the night the amado fell out of the worn-out grooves with a crash, knocking down the shoji, which fell on me, and rousing Ito, who rushed into my room half-asleep, with a vague vision of blood-thirsty Ainos in his mind. I then learned what I have been very stupid not to have learned before, that in these sliding wooden shutters there is a small door through which one person can creep at a time called the jishindo, or “earthquake door,” because it provides an exit during the alarm of an earthquake, in case of the amado sticking in their grooves, or their bolts going wrong. I believe that such a door exists in all Japanese houses.
The next morning was as beautiful as the previous evening, rose and gold instead of gold and pink. Before the sun was well up I visited a number of the Aino lodges, saw the bear, and the chief, who, like all the rest, is a monogamist, and, after breakfast, at my request, some of the old men came to give me such information as they had. These venerable elders sat cross-legged in the verandah, the house-master’s son, who kindly acted as interpreter, squatting, Japanese fashion, at the side, and about thirty Ainos, mostly women, with infants, sitting behind. I spent about two hours in going over the same ground as at Biratori, and also went over the words, and got some more, including some synonyms. The click of the ts before the ch at the beginning of a word is strongly marked among these Ainos. Some of their customs differ slightly from those of their brethren of the interior, specially as to the period of seclusion after a death, the non-allowance of polygamy to the chief, and the manner of killing the bear at the annual festival. Their ideas of metempsychosis are more definite, but this, I think, is to be accounted for by the influence and proximity of Buddhism. They spoke of the bear as their chief god, and next the sun and fire. They said that they no longer worship the wolf, and that though they call the volcano and many other things kamoi, or god, they do not worship them. I ascertained beyond doubt that worship with them means simply making libations of sake and “drinking to the god,” and that it is unaccompanied by petitions, or any vocal or mental act.
These Ainos are as dark as the people of southern Spain, and very hairy. Their ｅxpression is earnest and pathetic, and when they smiled, as they did when I could not pronounce their words, their faces had a touching sweetness which was quite beautiful, and European, not Asiatic. Their own impression is that they are now increasing in numbers after diminishing for many years. I left Usu sleeping in the loveliness of an autumn noon with great regret. No place that I have seen has fascinated me so much.
Letter 40—(Continued)
The Sea-shore — A “Hairy Aino”— A Horse Fight — The Horses of Yezo — “Bad Mountains”— A Slight Accident — Magnificent Scenery — A Bleached Halting–Place — A Musty Room — Aino “Good-breeding.”
A charge of 3 sen per ri more for the horses for the next stage, because there were such “bad mountains to cross,” prepared me for what followed — many miles of the worst road for horses I ever saw. I should not have complained if they had charged double the price. As an almost certain consequence, it was one of the most picturesque routes I have ever travelled. For some distance, however, it runs placidly along by the sea-shore, on which big, blue, foam-crested rollers were disporting themselves noisily, and passes through several Aino hamlets, and the Aino village of Abuta, with sixty houses, rather a prosperous-looking place, where the cultivation was considerably more careful, and the people possessed a number of horses. Several of the houses were surrounded by bears’ skulls grinning from between the forked tops of high poles, and there was a well-grown bear ready for his doom and apotheosis. In nearly all the houses a woman was weaving bark-cloth, with the hook which holds the web fixed into the ground several feet outside the house. At a deep river called the Nopkobets, which emerges from the mountains close to the sea, we were ferried by an Aino completely covered with hair, which on his shoulders was wavy like that of a retriever, and rendered clothing quite needless either for covering or warmth. A wavy, black beard rippled nearly to his waist over his furry chest, and, with his black locks hanging in masses over his shoulders, he would have looked a thorough savage had it not been for the exceeding sweetness of his smile and eyes. The Volcano Bay Ainos are far more hairy than the mountain Ainos, but even among them it is quite common to see men not more so than vigorous Europeans, and I think that the hairiness of the race as a distinctive feature has been much exaggerated, partly by the smooth-skinned Japanese.
The ferry scow was nearly upset by our four horses beginning to fight. At first one bit the shoulders of another; then the one attacked uttered short, sharp squeals, and returned the attack by striking with his fore feet, and then there was a general melee of striking and biting, till some ugly wounds were inflicted. I have watched fights of this kind on a large scale every day in the corral. The miseries of the Yezo horses are the great drawback of Yezo travelling. They are brutally used, and are covered with awful wounds from being driven at a fast “scramble” with the rude, ungirthed pack-saddle and its heavy load rolling about on their backs, and they are beaten unmercifully over their eyes and ears with heavy sticks. Ito has been barbarous to these gentle, little-prized animals ever since we came to Yezo; he has vexed me more by this than by anything else, especially as he never dared even to carry a switch on the main island, either from fear of the horses or their owners. To-day he was beating the baggage horse unmercifully, when I rode back and interfered with some very strong language, saying, “You are a bully, and, like all bullies, a coward.” Imagine my aggravation when, at our first halt, he brought out his note-book, as usual, and quietly asked me the meaning of the words “bully” and “coward.” It was perfectly impossible to explain them, so I said a bully was the worst name I could call him, and that a coward was the meanest thing a man could be. Then the provoking boy said, “Is bully a worse name than devil?” “Yes, far worse,” I said, on which he seemed rather crestfallen, and he has not beaten his horse since, in my sight at least
The breaking-in process is simply breaking the spirit by an hour or two of such atrocious cruelty as I saw at Shiraoi, at the end of which the horse, covered with foam and blood, and bleeding from mouth and nose, falls down exhausted. Being so ill used they have all kinds of tricks, such as lying down in fords, throwing themselves down head foremost and rolling over pack and rider, bucking, and resisting attempts to make them go otherwise than in single file. Instead of bits they have bars of wood on each side of the mouth, secured by a rope round the nose and chin. When horses which have been broken with bits gallop they put up their heads till the nose is level with the ears, and it is useless to try either to guide or check them. They are always wanting to join the great herds on the hillside or sea-shore, from which they are only driven down as they are needed. In every Yezo village the first sound that one hears at break of day is the gallop of forty or fifty horses, pursued by an Aino, who has hunted them from the hills. A horse is worth from twenty-eight shillings upwards. They are very sure-footed when their feet are not sore, and cross a stream or chasm on a single rickety plank, or walk on a narrow ledge above a river or gulch without fear. They are barefooted, their hoofs are very hard, and I am glad to be rid of the perpetual tying and untying and replacing of the straw shoes of the well-cared-for horses of the main island. A man rides with them, and for a man and three horses the charge is only sixpence for each 2.5 miles. I am now making Ito ride in front of me, to make sure that he does not beat or otherwise misuse his beast.
After crossing the Nopkobets, from which the fighting horses have led me to make so long a digression, we went right up into the “bad mountains,” and crossed the three tremendous passes of Lebungetoge. Except by saying that this disused bridle-track is impassable, people have scarcely exaggerated its difficulties. one horse broke down on the first pass, and we were long delayed by sending the Aino back for another. Possibly these extraordinary passes do not exceed 1500 feet in height, but the track ascends them through a dense forest with most extraordinary abruptness, to descend as abruptly, to rise again sometimes by a series of nearly washed-away zigzags, at others by a straight, ladder-like ascent deeply channelled, the bottom of the trough being filled with rough stones, large and small, or with ledges of rock with an entangled mass of branches and trailers overhead, which render it necessary to stoop over the horse’s head while he is either fumbling, stumbling, or tumbling among the stones in a gash a foot wide, or else is awkwardly leaping up broken rock steps nearly the height of his chest, the whole performance consisting of a series of scrambling jerks at the rate of a mile an hour.
In one of the worst places the Aino’s horse, which was just in front of mine, in trying to scramble up a nearly breast-high and much-worn ledge, fell backwards, nearly overturning my horse, the stretcher poles, which formed part of his pack, striking me so hard above my ankle that for some minutes afterwards I thought the bone was broken. The ankle was severely cut and bruised, and bled a good deal, and I was knocked out of the saddle. Ito’s horse fell three times, and eventually the four were roped together. Such are some of the divertissements of Yezo travel.
Ah, but it was glorious! The views are most magnificent. This is really Paradise. Everything is here — huge headlands magnificently timbered, small, deep bays into which the great green waves roll majestically, great, grey cliffs, too perpendicular for even the most adventurous trailer to find root-hold, bold bluffs and outlying stacks cedar-crested, glimpses of bright, blue ocean dimpling in the sunshine or tossing up wreaths of foam among ferns and trailers, and inland ranges of mountains forest-covered, with tremendous gorges between, forest filled, where wolf, bear, and deer make their nearly inaccessible lairs, and outlying battlements, and ridges of grey rock with hardly six feet of level on their sinuous tops, and cedars in masses giving deep shadow, and sprays of scarlet maple or festoons of a crimson vine lighting the gloom. The inland view suggested infinity. There seemed no limit to the forest-covered mountains and the unlighted ravines. The wealth of vegetation was equal in luxuriance and entanglement to that of the tropics, primeval vegetation, on which the lumberer’s axe has never rung. Trees of immense height and girth, specially the beautiful Salisburia adiantifolia, with its small fan-shaped leaves, all matted together by riotous lianas, rise out of an impenetrable undergrowth of the dwarf, dark-leaved bamboo, which, dwarf as it is, attains a height of seven feet, and all is dark, solemn, soundless, the haunt of wild beasts, and of butterflies and dragonflies of the most brilliant colours. There was light without heat, leaves and streams sparkled, and there was nothing of the half-smothered sensation which is often produced by the choking greenery of the main island, for frequently, far below, the Pacific flashed in all its sunlit beauty, and occasionally we came down unexpectedly on a little cove with abrupt cedar-crested headlands and stacks, and a heavy surf rolling in with the deep thunder music which alone breaks the stillness of this silent land.
There was one tremendous declivity where I got off to walk, but found it too steep to descend on foot with comfort. You can imagine how steep it was, when I tell you that the deep groove being too narrow for me to get to the side of my horse, I dropped down upon him from behind, between his tail and the saddle, and so scrambled on!
The sun had set and the dew was falling heavily when the track dipped over the brow of a headland, becoming a waterway so steep and rough that I could not get down it on foot without the assistance of my hands, and terminating on a lonely little bay of great beauty, walled in by impracticable-looking headlands, which was the entrance to an equally impracticable-looking, densely-wooded valley running up among densely-wooded mountains. There was a margin of grey sand above the sea, and on this the skeleton of an enormous whale was bleaching. Two or three large “dug-outs,” with planks laced with stout fibre on their gunwales, and some bleached drift-wood lay on the beach, the foreground of a solitary, rambling, dilapidated grey house, bleached like all else, where three Japanese men with an old Aino servant live to look after “Government interests,” whatever these may be, and keep rooms and horses for Government officials — a great boon to travellers who, like me, are belated here. only one person has passed Lebunge this year, except two officials and a policeman.
There was still a red glow on the water, and one horn of a young moon appeared above the wooded headland; but the loneliness and isolation are overpowering, and it is enough to produce madness to be shut in for ever with the thunder of the everlasting surf, which compels one to raise one’s voice in order to be heard. In the wood, half a mile from the sea, there is an Aino village of thirty houses, and the appearance of a few of the savages gliding noiselessly over the beach in the twilight added to the ghastliness and loneliness of the scene. The horses were unloaded by the time I arrived, and several courteous Ainos showed me to my room, opening on a small courtyard with a heavy gate. The room was musty, and, being rarely used, swarmed with spiders. A saucer of fish-oil and a wick rendered darkness visible, and showed faintly the dark, pathetic faces of a row of Ainos in the verandah, who retired noiselessly with their graceful salutation when I bade them good-night. Food was hardly to be expected, yet they gave me rice, potatoes, and black beans boiled in equal parts of brine and syrup, which are very palatable. The cuts and bruises of yesterday became so very painful with the cold of the early morning that I have been obliged to remain here.
I. L. B.
Letter 41
A Group of Fathers — The Lebunge Ainos — The Salisburia adiantifolia — A Family Group — The Missing Link — Oshamambe — Disorderly Horses — The River Yurapu — The Seaside — Aino Canoes — The Last Morning — Dodging Europeans.
HAKODATE, September 12.
Lebunge is a most fascinating place in its awful isolation. The house-master was a friendly man, and much attached to the Ainos. If other officials entrusted with Aino concerns treat the Ainos as fraternally as those of Usu and Lebunge, there is not much to lament. This man also gave them a high character for honesty and harmlessness, and asked if they might come and see me before I left; so twenty men, mostly carrying very pretty children, came into the yard with the horses. They had never seen a foreigner, but, either from apathy or politeness, they neither stare nor press upon one as the Japanese do, and always make a courteous recognition. The bear-skin housing of my saddle pleased them very much, and my boots of unblacked leather, which they compare to the deer-hide moccasins which they wear for winter hunting. Their voices were the lowest and most musical that I have heard, incongruous sounds to proceed from such hairy, powerful-looking men. Their love for their children was most marked. They caressed them tenderly, and held them aloft for notice, and when the house-master told them how much I admired the brown, dark-eyed, winsome creatures, their faces lighted with pleasure, and they saluted me over and over again. These, like other Ainos, utter a short screeching sound when they are not pleased, and then one recognises the savage.
These Lebunge Ainos differ considerably from those of the eastern villages, and I have again to notice the decided sound or click of the ts at the beginning of many words. Their skins are as swarthy as those of Bedaween, their foreheads comparatively low, their eyes far more deeply set their stature lower, their hair yet more abundant, the look of wistful melancholy more marked, and two, who were unclothed for hard work in fashioning a canoe, were almost entirely covered with short, black hair, specially thick on the shoulders and back, and so completely concealing the skin as to reconcile one to the lack of clothing. I noticed an enormous breadth of chest, and a great development of the muscles of the arms and legs. All these Ainos shave their hair off for two inches above their brows, only allowing it there to attain the length of an inch. Among the well-clothed Ainos in the yard there was one smooth-faced, smooth-skinned, concave-chested, spindle-limbed, yellow Japanese, with no other clothing than the decorated bark-cloth apron which the Ainos wear in addition to their coats and leggings. Escorted by these gentle, friendly savages, I visited their lodges, which are very small and poor, and in every way inferior to those of the mountain Ainos. The women are short and thick-set, and most uncomely.
From their village I started for the longest, and by reputation the worst, stage of my journey, seventeen miles, the first ten of which are over mountains. So solitary and disused is this track that on a four days’ journey we have not met a human being. In the Lebunge valley, which is densely forested, and abounds with fordable streams and treacherous ground, I came upon a grand specimen of the Salisburia adiantifolia, which, at a height of three feet from the ground, divides into eight lofty stems, none of them less than 2 feet 5 inches in diameter. This tree, which grows rapidly, is so well adapted to our climate that I wonder it has not been introduced on a large scale, as it may be seen by everybody in Kew Gardens. There is another tree with orbicular leaves in pairs, which grows to an immense size.
From this valley a worn-out, stony bridle-track ascends the western side of Lebungetoge, climbing through a dense forest of trees and trailers to a height of about 2000 feet, where, contented with its efforts, it reposes, and, with only slight ups and downs, continues along the top of a narrow ridge within the seaward mountains, between high walls of dense bamboo, which, for much of that day’s journey, is the undergrowth alike of mountain and valley, ragged peak, and rugged ravine. The scenery was as magnificent as on the previous day. A guide was absolutely needed, as the track ceased altogether in one place, and for some time the horses had to blunder their way along a bright, rushing river, swirling rapidly downwards, heavily bordered with bamboo, full of deep holes, and made difficult by trees which have fallen across it. There Ito, whose horse could not keep up with the others, was lost, or rather lost himself, which led to a delay of two hours. I have never seen grander forest than on that two days’ ride.
At last the track, barely passable after its recovery, dips over a precipitous bluff, and descends close to the sea, which has evidently receded considerably. Thence it runs for six miles on a level, sandy strip, covered near the sea with a dwarf bamboo about five inches high, and farther inland with red roses and blue campanula.
At the foot of the bluff there is a ruinous Japanese house, where an Aino family has been placed to give shelter and rest to any who may be crossing the pass. I opened my bento bako of red lacquer, and found that it contained some cold, waxy potatoes, on which I dined, with the addition of some tea, and then waited wearily for Ito, for whom the guide went in search. The house and its inmates were a study. The ceiling was gone, and all kinds of things, for which I could not imagine any possible use, hung from the blackened rafters. Everything was broken and decayed, and the dirt was appalling. A very ugly Aino woman, hardly human in her ugliness, was splitting bark fibre. There were several irori, Japanese fashion, and at one of them a grand-looking old man was seated apathetically contemplating the boiling of a pot. Old, and sitting among ruins, he represented the fate of a race which, living, has no history, and perishing leaves no monument. By the other irori sat, or rather crouched, the “MISSING LINK.” I was startled when I first saw it. It was — shall I say? — a man, and the mate, I cannot write the husband, of the ugly woman. It was about fifty. The lofty Aino brow had been made still loftier by shaving the head for three inches above it. The hair hung, not in shocks, but in snaky wisps, mingling with a beard which was grey and matted. The eyes were dark but vacant, and the face had no other ｅxpression than that look of apathetic melancholy which one sometimes sees on the faces of captive beasts. The arms and legs were unnaturally long and thin, and the creature sat with the knees tucked into the armpits. The limbs and body, with the exception of a patch on each side, were thinly covered with fine black hair, more than an inch long, which was slightly curly on the shoulders. It showed no other sign of intelligence than that evidenced by boiling water for my tea. When Ito arrived he looked at it with disgust, exclaiming, “The Ainos are just dogs; they had a dog for their father,” in allusion to their own legend of their origin.
The level was pleasant after the mountains, and a canter took us pleasantly to Oshamambe, where we struck the old road from Mori to Satsuporo, and where I halted for a day to rest my spine, from which I was suffering much. Oshamambe looks dismal even in the sunshine, decayed and dissipated, with many people lounging about in it doing nothing, with the dazed look which over-indulgence in sake gives to the eyes. The sun was scorching hot, and I was glad to find refuge from it in a crowded and dilapidated yadoya, where there were no black beans, and the use of eggs did not appear to be recognised. My room was only enclosed by shoji, and there were scarcely five minutes of the day in which eyes were not applied to the finger-holes with which they were liberally riddled; and during the night one of them fell down, revealing six Japanese sleeping in a row, each head on a wooden pillow.
The grandeur of the route ceased with the mountain-passes, but in the brilliant sunshine the ride from Oshamambe to Mori, which took me two days, was as pretty and pleasant as it could be. At first we got on very slowly, as besides my four horses there were four led ones going home, which got up fights and entangled their ropes, and occasionally lay down and rolled; and besides these there were three foals following their mothers, and if they stayed behind the mares hung back neighing, and if they frolicked ahead the mares wanted to look after them, and the whole string showed a combined inclination to dispense with their riders and join the many herds of horses which we passed. It was so tedious that, after enduring it for some time I got Ito’s horse and mine into a scow at a river of some size, and left the disorderly drove to follow at leisure.
At Yurapu, where there is an Aino village of thirty houses, we saw the last of the aborigines, and the interest of the journey ended. Strips of hard sand below high-water mark, strips of red roses, ranges of wooded mountains, rivers deep and shallow, a few villages of old grey houses amidst grey sand and bleaching driftwood, and then came the river Yurapu, a broad, deep stream, navigable in a canoe for fourteen miles. The scenery there was truly beautiful in the late and splendid afternoon. The long blue waves rolled on shore, each one crested with light as it curled before it broke, and hurled its snowy drift for miles along the coast with a deep booming music. The glorious inland view was composed of six ranges of forest-covered mountains, broken, chasmed, caverned, and dark with timber, and above them bald, grey peaks rose against a green sky of singular purity. I longed to take a boat up the Yurapu, which penetrates by many a gorge into their solemn recesses, but had not strength to carry my wish.
After this I exchanged the silence or low musical speech of Aino guides for the harsh and ceaseless clatter of Japanese. At Yamakushinoi, a small hamlet on the sea-shore, where I slept, there was a sweet, quiet yadoya, delightfully situated, with a wooded cliff at the back, over which a crescent hung out of a pure sky; and besides, there were the more solid pleasures of fish, eggs, and black beans. Thus, instead of being starved and finding wretched accommodation, the week I spent on Volcano Bay has been the best fed, as it was certainly the most comfortable, week of my travels in northern Japan.
Another glorious day favoured my ride to Mori, but I was unfortunate in my horse at each stage, and the Japanese guide was grumpy and ill-natured — a most unusual thing. Otoshibe and a few other small villages of grey houses, with “an ancient and fish-like smell,” lie along the coast, busy enough doubtless in the season, but now looking deserted and decayed, and houses are rather plentifully sprinkled along many parts of the shore, with a wonderful profusion of vegetables and flowers about them, raised from seeds liberally supplied by the Kaitakushi Department from its Nanai experimental farm and nurseries. For a considerable part of the way to Mori there is no track at all, though there is a good deal of travel. one makes one’s way fatiguingly along soft sea sand or coarse shingle close to the sea, or absolutely in it, under cliffs of hardened clay or yellow conglomerate, fording many small streams, several of which have cut their way deeply through a stratum of black volcanic sand. I have crossed about 100 rivers and streams on the Yezo coast, and all the larger ones are marked by a most noticeable peculiarity, i.e. that on nearing the sea they turn south, and run for some distance parallel with it, before they succeed in finding an exit through the bank of sand and shingle which forms the beach and blocks their progress.
On the way I saw two Ainos land through the surf in a canoe, in which they had paddled for nearly 100 miles. A river canoe is dug out of a single log, and two men can fashion one in five days; but on examining this one, which was twenty-five feet long, I found that it consisted of two halves, laced together with very strong bark fibre for their whole length, and with high sides also laced on. They consider that they are stronger for rough sea and surf work when made in two parts. Their bark-fibre rope is beautifully made, and they twist it of all sizes, from twine up to a nine-inch hawser.
Beautiful as the blue ocean was, I had too much of it, for the horses were either walking in a lather of sea foam or were crowded between the cliff and the sea, every larger wave breaking over my foot and irreverently splashing my face; and the surges were so loud-tongued and incessant, throwing themselves on the beach with a tremendous boom, and drawing the shingle back with them with an equally tremendous rattle, so impolite and noisy, bent only on showing their strength, reckless, rude, self-willed, and inconsiderate! This purposeless display of force, and this incessant waste of power, and the noisy self-assertion in both, approach vulgarity!
Towards evening we crossed the last of the bridgeless rivers, and put up at Mori, which I left three weeks before, and I was very thankful to have accomplished my object without disappointment, disaster, or any considerable discomfort. Had I not promised to return Ito to his master by a given day, I should like to spend the next six weeks in the Yezo wilds, for the climate is good, the scenery beautiful, and the objects of interest are many.
Another splendid day favoured my ride from Mori to Togenoshita, where I remained for the night, and I had exceptionally good horses for both days, though the one which Ito rode, while going at a rapid “scramble,” threw himself down three times and rolled over to rid himself from flies. I had not admired the wood between Mori and Ginsainoma (the lakes) on the sullen, grey day on which I saw it before, but this time there was an abundance of light and shadow and solar glitter, and many a scarlet spray and crimson trailer, and many a maple flaming in the valleys, gladdened me with the music of colour. From the top of the pass beyond the lakes there is a grand view of the volcano in all its nakedness, with its lava beds and fields of pumice, with the lakes of onuma, Konuma, and Ginsainoma, lying in the forests at its feet, and from the top of another hill there is a remarkable view of windy Hakodate, with its headland looking like Gibraltar. The slopes of this hill are covered with the Aconitum Japonicum, of which the Ainos make their arrow poison.
The yadoya at Togenoshita was a very pleasant and friendly one, and when Ito woke me yesterday morning, saying, “Are you sorry that it’s the last morning? I am,” I felt we had one subject in common, for I was very sorry to end my pleasant Yezo tour, and very sorry to part with the boy who had made himself more useful and invaluable even than before. It was most wearisome to have Hakodate in sight for twelve miles, so near across the bay, so far across the long, flat, stony strip which connects the headland upon which it is built with the mainland. For about three miles the road is rudely macadamised, and as soon as the bare-footed horses get upon it they seem lame of all their legs; they hang back, stumbling, dragging, edging to the side, and trying to run down every opening, so that when we got into the interminable main street I sent Ito on to the Consulate for my letters, and dismounted, hoping that as it was raining I should not see any foreigners; but I was not so lucky, for first I met Mr. Dening, and then, seeing the Consul and Dr. Hepburn coming down the road, evidently dressed for dining in the flag-ship, and looking spruce and clean, I dodged up an alley to avoid them; but they saw me, and did not wonder that I wished to escape notice, for my old betto’s hat, my torn green paper waterproof, and my riding-skirt and boots, were not only splashed but CAKED with mud, and I had the general look of a person “fresh from the wilds.”
I. L. B.
Itinerary of Tour in Yezo.
Hakodate to
| No. of Houses. | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jap. | Aino. | Ri. | Cho. | |
| Ginsainoma | 4 | 7 | 18 | |
| Mori | 105 | 4 | ||
| Mororan | 57 | 11 | ||
| Horobets | 18 | 47 | 5 | 1 |
| Shiraoi | 11 | 51 | 6 | 32 |
| Tomakomai | 38 | 5 | 21 | |
| Yubets | 7 | 3 | 3 | 5 |
| Sarufuto | 63 | 7 | 5 | |
| Biratori | 53 | 5 | ||
| Mombets | 27 | 5 | 1 | |
From Horobets to
| Jap. | Aino. | Ri. | Cho. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Old Mororan | 9 | 30 | 4 | 28 |
| Usu | 3 | 99 | 6 | 2 |
| Lebunge | 1 | 27 | 5 | 22 |
| Oshamambe | 56 | 38 | 6 | 34 |
| Yamakushinai | 40 | 4 | 18 | |
| Otoshibe | 40 | 2 | 3 | |
| Mori | 105 | 3 | 29 | |
| Togenoshita | 55 | 6 | 7 | |
| Hakodate | 37,000 souls | 3 | 29 |
About 358 English miles.
Letter 42
Pleasant Last Impressions — The Japanese Junk — Ito Disappears — My Letter of Thanks.
HAKODATE, YEZO, September 14, 1878.
This is my last day in Yezo, and the sun, shining brightly over the grey and windy capital, is touching the pink peaks of Komono-taki with a deeper red, and is brightening my last impressions, which, like my first, are very pleasant. The bay is deep blue, flecked with violet shadows, and about sixty junks are floating upon it at anchor. There are vessels of foreign rig too, but the wan, pale junks lying motionless, or rolling into the harbour under their great white sails, fascinate me as when I first saw them in the Gulf of Yedo. They are antique-looking and picturesque, but are fitter to give interest to a picture than to battle with stormy seas.
Most of the junks in the bay are about 120 tons burthen, 100 feet long, with an extreme beam, far aft, of twenty-five feet. The bow is long, and curves into a lofty stem, like that of a Roman galley, finished with a beak head, to secure the forestay of the mast. This beak is furnished with two large, goggle eyes. The mast is a ponderous spar, fifty feet high, composed of pieces of pine, pegged, glued, and hooped together. A heavy yard is hung amidships. The sail is an oblong of widths of strong, white cotton artistically “PUCKERED,” not sewn together, but laced vertically, leaving a decorative lacing six inches wide between each two widths. Instead of reefing in a strong wind, a width is unlaced, so as to reduce the canvas vertically, not horizontally. Two blue spheres commonly adorn the sail. The mast is placed well abaft, and to tack or veer it is only necessary to reverse the sheet. When on a wind the long bow and nose serve as a head-sail. The high, square, piled-up stern, with its antique carving, and the sides with their lattice-work, are wonderful, together with the extraordinary size and projection of the rudder, and the length of the tiller. The anchors are of grapnel shape, and the larger junks have from six to eight arranged on the fore-end, giving one an idea of bad holding-ground along the coast. They really are much like the shape of a Chinese “small-footed” woman’s shoe, and look very unmanageable. They are of unpainted wood, and have a wintry, ghastly look about them. 22
I have parted with Ito finally today, with great regret. He has served me faithfully, and on most common topics I can get much more information through him than from any foreigner. I miss him already, though he insisted on packing for me as usual, and put all my things in order. His cleverness is something surprising. He goes to a good, manly master, who will help him to be good and set him a virtuous example, and that is a satisfaction. Before he left he wrote a letter for me to the Governor of Mororan, thanking him on my behalf for the use of the kuruma and other courtesies.
I. L. B.
22 The duty paid by junks is 4s. for each twenty-five tons, by foreign ships of foreign shape and rig 2 pounds for each 100 tons, and by steamers 3 pounds for each 100 tons.
Letter 43
Pleasant Prospects — A Miserable Disappointment — Caught in a Typhoon — A Dense Fog — Alarmist Rumours — A Welcome at Tokiyo — The Last of the Mutineers.
H. B. M.‘s LEGATION, YEDO, September 21.
A placid sea, which after much disturbance had sighed itself to rest, and a high, steady barometer promised a fifty hours’ passage to Yokohama, and when Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn and I left Hakodate, by moonlight, on the night of the 14th, as the only passengers in the Hiogo Maru, Captain Moore, her genial, pleasant master, congratulated us on the rapid and delightful passage before us, and we separated at midnight with many projects for pleasant intercourse and occupation.
But a more miserable voyage I never made, and it was not until the afternoon of the 17th that we crawled forth from our cabins to speak to each other. on the second day out, great heat came on with suffocating closeness, the mercury rose to 85 degrees, and in lat. 38 degrees 0’ N. and long. 141 degrees 30’ E. we encountered a “typhoon,” otherwise a “cyclone,” otherwise a “revolving hurricane,” which lasted for twenty-five hours, and “jettisoned” the cargo. Captain Moor has given me a very interesting diagram of it, showing the attempts which he made to avoid its vortex, through which our course would have taken us, and to keep as much outside it as possible. The typhoon was succeeded by a dense fog, so that our fifty-hour passage became seventy-two hours, and we landed at Yokohama near upon midnight of the 17th, to find traces of much disaster, the whole low-lying country flooded, the railway between Yokohama and the capital impassable, great anxiety about the rice crop, the air full of alarmist rumours, and paper money, which was about par when I arrived in May, at a discount of 13 per cent! In the early part of this year (1880) it has touched 42 per cent.
Late in the afternoon the railroad was re-opened, and I came here with Mr. Wilkinson, glad to settle down to a period of rest and ease under this hospitable roof. The afternoon was bright and sunny, and Tokiyo was looking its best. The long lines of yashikis looked handsome, the castle moat was so full of the gigantic leaves of the lotus, that the water was hardly visible, the grass embankments of the upper moat were a brilliant green, the pines on their summits stood out boldly against the clear sky, the hill on which the Legation stands looked dry and cheerful, and, better than all, I had a most kindly welcome from those who have made this house my home in a strange land.
Tokiyo is tranquil, that is, it is disturbed only by fears for the rice crop, and by the fall in satsu. The military mutineers have been tried, popular rumour says tortured, and fifty-two have been shot. The summer has been the worst for some years, and now dark heat, moist heat, and nearly ceasless rain prevail. People have been “rained up” in their summer quarters. “Surely it will change soon,” people say, and they have said the same thing for three months.
I. L. B.
Letter 44
Fine Weather — Cremation in Japan — The Governor of Tokiyo — An Awkward Question — An Insignificant Building — Economy in Funeral Expenses — Simplicity of the Cremation Process — The Last of Japan.
H. B. M.’s LEGATION, YEDO, December 18.
I have spent the last ten days here, in settled fine weather, such as should have begun two months ago if the climate had behaved as it ought. The time has flown by in excursions, shopping, select little dinner-parties, farewell calls, and visits made with Mr. Chamberlain to the famous groves and temples of Ikegami, where the Buddhist bishop and priests entertained us in one of the guest-rooms, and to Enoshima and Kamakura, “vulgar” resorts which nothing can vulgarise so long as Fujisan towers above them.
I will mention but one “sight,” which is so far out of the beaten track that it was only after prolonged inquiry that its whereabouts was ascertained. Among Buddhists, specially of the Monto sect, cremation was largely practised till it was forbidden five years ago, as some suppose in deference to European prejudices. Three years ago, however, the prohibition was withdrawn, and in this short space of time the number of bodies burned has reached nearly nine thousand annually. Sir H. Parkes applied for permission for me to visit the Kirigaya ground, one of five, and after a few delays it was granted by the Governor of Tokiyo at Mr. Mori’s request, so yesterday, attended by the Legation linguist, I presented myself at the fine yashiki of the Tokiyo Fu, and quite unexpectedly was admitted to an audience of the Governor. Mr. Kusamoto is a well-bred gentleman, and his face expresses the energy and ability which he has given proof of possessing. He wears his European clothes becomingly, and in attitude, as well as manner, is easy and dignified. After asking me a great deal about my northern tour and the Ainos, he expressed a wish for candid criticism; but as this in the East must not be taken literally, I merely ventured to say that the roads lag behind the progress made in other directions, upon which he entered upon explanations which doubtless apply to the past road-history of the country. He spoke of cremation and its “necessity” in large cities, and terminated the interview by requesting me to dismiss my interpreter and kuruma, as he was going to send me to Meguro in his own carriage with one of the Government interpreters, adding very courteously that it gave him pleasure to show this attention to a guest of the British Minister, “for whose character and important services to Japan he has a high value.”
An hour’s drive, with an extra amount of yelling from the bettos, took us to a suburb of little hills and valleys, where red camellias and feathery bamboo against backgrounds of cryptomeria contrast with the grey monotone of British winters, and, alighting at a farm road too rough for a carriage, we passed through fields and hedgerows to an erection which looks too insignificant for such solemn use. Don’t expect any ghastly details. A longish building of “wattle and dab,” much like the northern farmhouses, a high roof, and chimneys resembling those of the “oast houses” in Kent, combine with the rural surroundings to suggest “farm buildings” rather than the “funeral pyre,” and all that is horrible is left to the imagination.
The end nearest the road is a little temple, much crowded with images, and small, red, earthenware urns and tongs for sale to the relatives of deceased persons, and beyond this are four rooms with earthen floors and mud walls; nothing noticeable about them except the height of the peaked roof and the dark colour of the plaster. In the middle of the largest are several pairs of granite supports at equal distances from each other, and in the smallest there is a solitary pair. This was literally all that was to be seen. In the large room several bodies are burned at one time, and the charge is only one yen, about 3s. 8d., solitary cremation costing five yen. Faggots are used, and 1s. worth ordinarily suffices to reduce a human form to ashes. After the funeral service in the house the body is brought to the cremation ground, and is left in charge of the attendant, a melancholy, smoked-looking man, as well he may be. The richer people sometimes pay priests to be present during the burning, but this is not usual. There were five “quick-tubs” of pine hooped with bamboo in the larger room, containing the remains of coolies, and a few oblong pine chests in the small rooms containing those of middle-class people. At 8 p.m. each “coffin” is placed on the stone trestles, the faggots are lighted underneath, the fires are replenished during the night, and by 6 a.m. that which was a human being is a small heap of ashes, which is placed in an urn by the relatives and is honourably interred. In some cases the priests accompany the relations on this last mournful errand. Thirteen bodies were burned the night before my visit, but there was not the slightest odour in or about the building, and the interpreter told me that, owing to the height of the chimneys, the people of the neighbourhood never experience the least annoyance, even while the process is going on. The simplicity of the arrangement is very remarkable, and there can be no reasonable doubt that it serves the purpose of the innocuous and complete destruction of the corpse as well as any complicated apparatus (if not better), while its cheapness places it within the reach of the class which is most heavily burdened by ordinary funeral expenses. 23 This morning the Governor sent his secretary to present me with a translation of an interesting account of the practice of cremation and its introduction into Japan.
SS. “Volga,” Christmas Eve, 1878. — The snowy dome of Fujisan reddening in the sunrise rose above the violet woodlands of Mississippi Bay as we steamed out of Yokohama Harbour on the 19th, and three days later I saw the last of Japan — a rugged coast, lashed by a wintry sea.
I. L. B.
23 The following very inaccurate but entertaining account of this expedition was given by the Yomi-uri-Shimbun, a daily newspaper with the largest, though not the most aristocratic, circulation in Tokiyo, being taken in by the servants and tradespeople. It is a literal translation made by Mr. Chamberlain. “The person mentioned in our yesterday’s issue as ‘an English subject of the name of Bird’ is a lady from Scotland, a part of England. This lady spends her time in travelling, leaving this year the two American continents for a passing visit to the Sandwich Islands, and landing in Japan early in the month of May. She has toured all over the country, and even made a five months’ stay in the Hokkaido, investigating the local customs and productions. Her inspection yesterday of the cremation ground at Kirigaya is believed to have been prompted by a knowledge of the advantages of this method of disposing of the dead, and a desire to introduce the same into England(!) on account of this lady’s being so learned as to have published a quantity of books, His Excellency the Governor was pleased to see her yesterday, and to show her great civility, sending her to Kirigaya in his own carriage, a mark of attention which is said to have pleased the lady much(!)”
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