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 Yoshitsuné, 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 Shintô. The solitary exception to their adoration of animate and inanimate nature appears to be the reverence paid to Yoshitsuné, to whom they believe they are greatly indebted, and who, it is supposed by some, will yet interfere on their behalf. Their gods—that is, the outward symbols of their religion, corresponding most likely with the Shintô 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 saké.