I shall not discuss this question at greater length; but for the sake of readers who are interested in the subject it may be well to make two or three more statements before closing this chapter. The Ainu do not know of a heaven and hell; but in one of the latest publications on the aborigines of Japan we are told that they do; and, moreover, that they are fully aware of the resurrection of the body in the other world!
Even assuming, for the moment, that the Ainu are theists, or polytheists, after what we have heard of their gods, this is a somewhat surprising statement. It will be remembered that anything good or bad, dreaded or repulsive, respected or not respected, is qualified by the Ainu as Kamui, and we shall attribute for a while the imaginary meaning of "God" to the word. Now, if everything and everybody, good or bad, is equally a god, I myself fail to see the necessity of a hell, as the chances are that all the gods would inhabit heaven. This alone serves to show how absurd the theory is; but I wish to give the exact translation of the words Kando and Teine-pokna-moshiri, which are said to be the two Ainu expressions for "heaven" and "hell."
Kando means "sky," not "heaven." Teine-pokna-moshiri[41] stands for the "wet earth under(ground)." As the Ainu are in the habit of burying their dead, I find it more rational to apply to the words in question the meaning of a "burial-place," a "cold place of rest" rather than that of Hades or Gehenna.
"They" (the Ainu), says a learned missionary, "seem to conceive of men and women as living in large communities in the other world in the same way and under the same conditions as they do in this, excepting that they can know no death." In other words, resurrection of the body and eternal life.
Strange to say, the writer of the same lines asserted in the "Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan,"[42] that "The Ainu know nothing of a resurrection of the body."
It must not be argued that because they have no religion the Ainu are bad people. They are far from it. They are decidedly not moral, for nothing is immoral among them. The Ainu must be considered more as animals than as human beings. When we speak of a dog, we do not ask whether it is a moral dog, but only if it is a good dog. The same can be said of the Ainu. We cannot compare them to ourselves, nor judge them by our own standard of morality. Taken by themselves they are gentle, kind, brave, and above everything they are simple. Their language, manners, customs, arts, habits, as we have seen, are the very simplest and rudest possible. Thus, it is absurd to suppose that such simple brains could entertain high religious ideas. If they had brains enough to compass high religious beliefs they would long ago have used those brains in bettering their miserable condition and filthy mode of living. They would have striven to make the beginnings of a history and a literature, or at least to have devised or adopted some mode of writing with which they could preserve these high ideas, and pass them on from generation to generation. Even their language is so poor in words as to hardly express their everyday wants. The Ainu are low in the scale of humanity. They have always been low; they have not sunk, for they have never risen. They have never done any harm in this world, and they will never do any good.
The Ainu are without laws, which, paradoxical as it sounds, to a great extent makes them good. People are never so good as when no harm can be done. There are indeed few crimes among them; no voluntary infanticides; very very rarely murders; no suicides; little theft, and as little treachery among people of the same tribe. Though usually retiring and reserved, they are hospitable on special occasions, and generous with what little they possess. The young show an instinctive reverence for the aged, without considering it a virtue or a duty. Cowardice is despised by the Ainu, but courage, endurance of pain, and hardship, drunkenness, and similar qualities, are looked on as the chief virtues in men. Punishments are seldom inflicted by Ainu on any of their tribesmen, and the crime must indeed be great to raise the whole community against the criminal. If by rare chance some great evil has been done, the chief of the village and all the men assemble, and decide on the punishment to be inflicted. Flogging is the general punishment for the lesser crimes, which, according to Ainu ideas, are theft and assault. The murder of a tribesman is sometimes punished by cutting the tendons of the hands and feet of the murderer, thus disabling him from hunting or fishing. If, however, the man murdered was of another tribe, or a Japanese, this Draconian kind of justice is not administered. Quarrels among tribesmen are settled by private retribution, and no one interferes either one way or the other. These quarrels, however, very seldom occur, as the Ainu are naturally a peaceful people. Imprisonment does not exist, for the simple reason that the Ainu have no prisons. They do not know what a prison is; neither is capital punishment practised by them. According to their own ideas they are not cruel to children, for we seldom see them wilfully ill-treating them; but according to civilised notions Ainu women make shockingly bad mothers. They love, but they do not look after, nor practically take care of, their little ones after these are about a year and a half old; and as to washing them, combing their hair, educating them, or trying to cure them of the thousand and one wretched skin diseases, which come chiefly by their own neglect, an Ainu mother puts her hand to these things no more than the men put theirs to the building of a temple or the creation of a literature. This neglect is not with them, as it would be with us, an intolerable crime, but is the natural result of their animal instinct as contradistinguished from rational development. For if a baby is not old enough at one and a half years of age to take care of himself, he is of no good as an Ainu. It is needless to add that, in these circumstances, most of them are of no good, and that the percentage of infantile deaths is appalling to a civilised mind.
1, 7, INAO-NETUBA. 2, 3, 4, 5, CHISEI-KARA-INAO. 6, A PESTLE OR POUNDER.