the women and girls. At the first glance one is deceived into supposing that the young men wear very delicate mustaches and train them carefully! As there are no written records of any kind among the Ainu, no means of communication except oral, it is impossible to get at anything like a satisfactory explanation of this curious and thoroughly disfiguring custom. The people themselves say that they adopted it from the people whom they found in possession of the land (Yezo) when they came to the island from the West (?). Those people, the Koropok-guru, they say were smaller than themselves, and were very soon and easily subjugated; but, evincing a kindly disposition, and a desire to affiliate with the new-comers, rather than to continue to wage war upon them, they (the Ainu) met their overtures half-way, ceased to fight them, and adopted some of their customs, one of them being this curious tattooing. The process commences when a girl is about ten years of age. A woman makes a number of small cuts with a sharp knife on the lips and around the mouth, deep enough to cause the blood to flow freely. With some of the blood, and soot obtained by catching on the bottom of an iron pot, or anything else which may come handy, the smoke from burning birch-bark, a paste is made and well rubbed into the incisions. After the resulting inflammation has subsided, a number of blue marks are seen, and the process is continued until the girl becomes a woman, when the mouth presents the appearance of being surrounded by a growth of hair trained into the dainty mustaches of a most consummate dandy. The tattooing around the mouth covers about one half of the lips, so that when the mouth is closed they appear of rather a sickly color. In the mean time the tattoo-marks have been applied to the forehead, and a heavy line drawn just over the bridge of the nose to connect the eyebrows (which are not shaved off, as was the universal custom among the married women of Japan),[1] and on the back of the hands and up the forearm to the elbow in a rude geometrical pattern.
Although the Ainu now use Japanese cotton and hemp as materials for clothing whenever they can get them, they still are compelled, at times, to resort to the material called attush. This is "the inner bark of a kind of elm, possibly Ulmus montana of Franchet and Savatier's catalogue of Japanese plants, generally known in Yezo as Ohiyo, but the true Ainu name of which is At-ni, attush meaning 'elm-fiber.'" It is thoroughly hackled, then spun (or drawn out into strands), and afterward
- ↑ This custom is rapidly disappearing from the neighborhood of the treaty ports, and to some extent in the interior, as is also the still more disfiguring sign of a married woman, viz., the blackened teeth. With them are going the short queue and partly shaved head of the men.
