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.
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