Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

The chief interest of the average casual visitor to Japan's north island is, no doubt, in the remnants of its primitive people, the "hairy Ainu. " A cluster of them dwell in the outskirts of Asahigawa; there are scattered Ainu villages along the farther reaches of the Hokkaido coast, and here and there in the forested mountains. Subservient now to their conquerors as are our own Indians, their customs and even their language have taken on many things from the Japanese. In theory the mikado's Government acts the rôle of altruistic guardian over the scanty twenty thousand of these aborigines which its records claim still survive, in Yezo, in the scattered Kuriles, and in the Japanese half of the once Russian island of Karafuto, or Saghalien, still farther north. There are no cases listed, however, of these helpless wards' amassing pianos and automobiles from natural resources discovered on their reservations. Driven, if admittedly faulty historical records be accepted as veracious evidence, from their once solid foothold on the main island of Japan to the nooks and crannies of its frigid neighbors during the more than twenty-five centuries since their slant-eyed foes came upon them from somewhere to the south, the Ainus have lost completely their former rugged power of physical resistance to such aggression.

The experienced traveler gradually learns that outward appearances are often deceitful; hence there is perhaps no proof of anything in the fact that the Ainu, even the defeated dregs of the race which survive to-day, are much handsomer specimens of the human family, at least to Western eyes, than their conquerors. The women, to be sure, are mainly slatterns, as is so often the case among primitive peoples, particularly those under the domination of what we fondly call civilization. But it was hard to realize that these sturdy, upstanding men, not merely more powerful but far more comely than the average Japanese, are little more than children in intellect. What seems to have been a sincere effort to educate a picked group of Ainu youths in Tokyo ended with an even more sudden relapse into savagery than was ever the case with our Indian-school graduates.