Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Isabella Lucy Bird [learn to read books TXT] 📗

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.



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