ABORIGINES OF JAPAN by Henry Hartshorne

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 17, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 37.

ABORIGINES OF JAPAN.

By Henry Hartshorne

BY HENRY HARTSHORNE, M.D., LL.D.

Hokkaido, Japan.

WHEN the Yamato people, as the Japanese once called themselves, came, as Rein expresses it, like Norman vikings, crossing from Asia to invade what is now known as Nippon, or Nihon, Japan, they found, according to tradition, sustained by other evidence, a numerous people in possession,—the Emisi, more barbarous, but less warlike, than their invaders.

Whether these so-called aborigines succeeded a yet inferior race can not now be made certain. Stories abound of pigmies, Koropokoru, pit-dwellers, tiny men, like those seen by Stanley and DuChaillu in parts of Africa. Skeletons of such have not been found, and it is most probable that they belong in the region of folk-lore fancy, like the gnomes, kobolds, sprites, and fairies of many lands. Remains have been discovered by Professor Morse, and others, of implements unlike those in use by Japanese since their history began. But, altho they differ also from those now made and used by the Ainu, such differences may easily have come about with time in the same races, as there is little or no doubt that the mound-builders of North America were of the same blood as the Indian tribes still wandering, until displaced within a century, over the region in which they made constructions such as no Indians now make or have in memory or tradition.

Ainu is the name by which those formerly called Emisi by the Japanese now designate themselves. They are almost entirely confined to the large northern island, Yezzo, recently called the Hokkaido. A few are still left in the Kurile Islands, and possibly some in Saghalien. But when, many years ago, the latter island was ceded to Russia, in exchange for the Kuriles, most of the Ainu there were deported to Yezzo. Like the Acadians, whose unwilling exile is celebrated in Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” they are said to have changed their abiding-place with sadness, and their chief took his life soon after reaching Japan.

Hunting and fishing have always been the occupations of the Ainu. A few families in the Hokkaido have lately taken to farming, under the inducement of a “land in severalty” arrangement of the Japanese Government, offering to each family twelve and a half acres of land for settlement without cost to them. They are brave hunters, especially of the bears, which are still found, and once abounded in their country. Bears’ cubs are often caught and reared by them, to be killed, after a time, with ceremony and festivity, a sort of sacredness as well as food value attaching to them.

The Ainu are certainly an entirely different race from the Japanese. They are the most hairy people in the world. The Japanese have, like them, long, straight, dark hair on their heads, but are mostly beardless, and have very little hair on their breasts or limbs. The Ainu have very thick and abundant beard all over their faces, hairy breasts, arms and legs, and sometimes hair upon their backs. Ainu eyes are large and straight, their eyebrows low, straight, and bushy. Their figure is but little taller than that of the Japanese, but they are stronger and more broad-shouldered. The men are often handsome. Miss Bird (now Mrs. Bishop) says that one whom she met had the most beautiful face she had ever seen. Their women might, perhaps, be handsome, if they did not tattoo their upper lips and foreheads in the most unbecoming fashion.

Dirt is conspicuous about the houses and persons of the Ainu; cleanliness is a universal national or race trait with the Japanese. Batchelor says that the Ainu are not naturally stupid, but their subjugated condition has made them abject. They have been left in ignorance, until lately an “Ainu Improvement Society” has been started in Sapporo, the capital of the Hokkaido. Saké, Japanese beer or wine, has been the cause of their almost final ruin. Both the government and the better class of people in Japan, under Christian influence, are now, like our American people, after our “century of dishonor” towards the Indians, beginning to try to do something to humanize the long-trampled Ainu.

No doubt needs to exist that these, the oldest known inhabitants of Japan, now numbering less than twenty thousand in all, are of far northern extraction, akin to the Kamtschatkans, the Siberians, Eskimos, and Alaskans. Their own traditions point towards the north for their emigration. Their religion (very vague, but without idolatry) makes the place of punishment after death to be a very cold region. Their kindest wish for a parting friend is, “May you be kept warm.”

Thus, by exclusion, we are left to seek for the probable origin of the Japanese race farther south. Certainly they are not Chinese or Koreans, altho the latter approach them in some particulars. Intermixture with them may have taken place to some extent when, after the conquest of Korea by the Japanese empress Jingu Kogo, early in the third century A.D., a number of its inhabitants were transported to Japan. Much intermixture with either the Chinese or the Ainu is not made probable by any proven facts. It is just possible that its exceptional occurrence may account for what authors speak of as a diversity of types in the Japanese population. For example, a more than usually marked obliquity of the eyes is said to exist among members of some of the older families of the nobility, and may point towards an ancestral Chinese strain of descent. The depressed, thick nose and large mouth, with straight brows and eyes, of the Eta class, may indicate a mingling, long ago, of the Yamato conquerors with the subjected Ainu race.

We have still left for consideration material for conjectures, with a measure of probability in their favor, concerning the actual origin and affinities of the Japanese, remarkable as have become their peculiarities in the course of many centuries of insular and for a long time secluded life.—S. S. Times.