They now live in communities of fifteen or twenty families, under a patriarchal chief. Their huts are of mud, thatched with dried leaves, straw, or branches of trees plaited together. Their manners are bright and cheerful at home, and extremely courteous when abroad; they salute one another by bowing to the ground. Their judicial cases are presided over by the chiefs of adjoining villages; and law is administered with something of the quiet dignity of a religious ceremony.
Although they obtain from the Japanese rice, tea, sugar, and many other necessities, by bartering furs and skins, still the sounds of some few industries may be heard in their villages: the thumping of the cloth-maker, the song of the cord-twister and the net-maker; the elder women turn the soft tree-wool into thread wherewith to spin their garments, the younger women rock their children to sleep to the wildest and most plaintive airs ever tuned by a savage tribe. The young men are hunters, trappers and fishermen.
When evening draws on the Aino villages resound to the drum, bagpipe and flute, a bonfire crackles and flames on the village common, an itinerant trader, or Shinto priest with his wondrous tales of the sun goddess or demons, and heroes, or perchance a more civilized Buddhist missionary, is hospitably regaled with the best the village affords; the Ainos boys and girls, shy as wild deer, will by degrees cluster around the one or the other, examine the peddlers wares, listen to the stories of Ise, the sun goddess, or sit drinking in the tale of the good Buddha which never fails to move to love the most savage of human hearts.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
