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.
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