PESTLE.
MORTAR. It may be as well to state that the Ainu have never been known to make pottery. What they have of the kind is imported and sold to or exchanged with them by the Japanese. If I were an Irishman I should say that real Ainu pottery is made of wood. Nevertheless, large shells are often used by them as drinking vessels where wooden bowls are not obtainable. It is a common occurrence in Ainu households that one bowl is used by several individuals, and a more common occurrence still that none of the bowls are ever washed or cleaned after having been used.
The small Ainu porch which stands frequently at the entrance of Ainu huts answers the purpose of a stackhouse, and in it is stored the firewood used in the house. The wooden mortar and the long pestle are kept in a corner under the porch. In the more civilised parts of Yezo these pestles and mortars are general, as the natives use them for pounding millet.
The pure Ainu live principally on animal food—fish and meat—sea-weed, and some kinds of roots and herbs, which they find on the mountains. Metallurgy is utterly unknown to the Ainu. Until of late years they possessed nothing made of metal. Their arrows had bamboo or bone heads; tin or iron cooking utensils they had none; and the blades of their knives were and are of Japanese origin. Some of these blades are very old, and were acquired by the Ainu in the battles which they fought against the Japanese; others have been got by barter-metal exchanged for skins of animals.
Furthermore, save the weaving-loom, the Ainu possess no machinery of their own make. This too, as we have seen, is but a very rude and simple kind of machine. The application of wind or water power to economise human labour is in no way known to them; thus they have no windlasses, no pumps, no bellows, no windmills, no waterwheels; neither have they any signs of the rudest form of machinery moved by manual power which they have imagined and made for themselves. Furthermore, they are very loth to accept those mechanical means of economising labour which are employed by their neighbours the Japanese.
The Ainu are very conservative, little as they may have to preserve. They show a great dislike to change or reform their habits and customs, or to improve themselves in any way. Worse they could certainly not be. They have no ancestral attachment which makes them unwilling to discard their rude practices for more civilised ways; but, acting according to their instincts, and not by their intelligence, they preserve customs which seem inconvenient and unpractical to us, which habit has rendered familiar and pleasant to them.
Various natives in other parts of the world show signs of an earlier state of civilisation, but the Ainu do not. They have never had a past civilisation, they are not civilised now, and what is more, they will never be civilised. Civilisation kills them. As a hog delights in filth, so the Ainu can only live in dirt, neglect, and savagery of personal habits. They are made that way, and they cannot help it. They are excluded from progress by an impassable barrier. They have many miseries in their life, but no greater misery could befall an Ainu than to be forced to lead a civilised existence. Even after they have been educated in Japanese schools, when they return home, in a short time they forget all they have learned, and discard their acquired civilisation for the old, free, untrammelled mountain life; the wild habits of the woods and sea-shore; the nakedness of summer and the stifling squalor of the one small dingy hut in winter; the uncombed hair and matted beard; the putrid flesh of salmon, and the vile compound they revel in till they get gloriously drunk and bestial.