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.
LETTER XXXVII - (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.
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