In these circumstances Mr. Torii, a learned Japanese, set himself a few years ago to ascertain and record all that was known about them. This volume embodies the results of his researches. It is illustrated by thirty-eight fine plates, including a number of photographs of the people, their dwellings, clothing and weapons, both ancient and modern, their graves and stone circles. The Ainu are peculiarly interesting. Physically they are quite distinct from all the surrounding peoples of Japan and Saghalin, as well as of the mainland of Asia. They have a folk-lore of their own, as readers of Mr. Batchelor’s books on the subject know. They are held by many distinguished anthropologists to be an outlier of the Alpine race, such remarkable physical resemblances do they show to it. But how they got so far afield is a problem still awaiting solution. Mr. Torii does not derive them from so distant a place of origin as Europe: he is content to bring them from the south of Persia. His reasons for the conjecture are set forth very fairly, though he is hardly abreast of European enquiries. The Ainu, he thinks, came over to Japan in more than one swarm, and the Kurile Ainu represent the first swarm, pushed out into the Kurile Islands by the subsequent intruders of the same race, whose common origin they had forgotten, and with whom their relations were hostile.
Mr. Torii enumerates eight gods, of whom the chief is Kannau-Kamoui, the thunder or heaven-god. The term Kamui for god will be recognised as that of the Ainu of Japan, and the probable origin of the Japanese word Kami; but the list of gods by no means tallies with that of the Ainu of Japan given by Mr. Batchelor. Long separation and a different environment are sufficient to account for this. The ceremonial slaughter of the bear, practised by their congeners in Japan and Saghalin, as also by the Gilyaks, is unknown in the Kurile Islands. But, as in Japan itself, the inao is a familiar object also in the Kurile Islands. It is the sign and symbol of religious worship. It is more than this: it is itself a sacred object, so sacred, at least in the Kurile Islands, that no woman dares to make it, and the men only after special purificatory ceremonies. Materially it is a stick of willow scraped, with the scrapings still adhering to
