Closely allied with writing is, of course, map-drawing and ornamentations. Map drawing can be dismissed at once, like that famous chapter on snakes in Iceland, as the Ainu know nothing of it.
Rough ornamentations on bone and wooden implements are their only artistic efforts. Truthful representations of figures and animals are seldom attempted,[37] but conventionalised symbols, suggested by and based on certain forms of animal or vegetable life, are occasionally used for ornamentation.
The Ainu have no rock-sculptures, and can neither paint nor draw in any form; what they have are mere simple wood-carvings. But only a few have any aptitude for even this crude work, though of course they are not all alike. As with us we have people who are artistic and people who are Philistine, so with the Ainu, in that very humble degree which is to Western art what an acorn is to an oak.
Like all early work, Ainu art—if we may call it so—aims at a certain uniformity, especially in leaf-portraiture, so as to produce a somewhat symmetrical pattern; for at all times geometry has been the mother of design.
An Ainu does not go for his models direct to Nature, neither does he servilely copy his neighbour's work; but he gets his ideas indirectly from both these sources, and through inability to copy accurately, negligence in close study, and some amount of native imagination combined, varies the design which he has seen to such an extent as to make it in a sense original. The talent shown by different men in the art of carving varies considerably, even in men of the same tribe; while certain tribes show both aptitude and fondness for these ornamentations, whereas others have little of either.
It is the Ainu of the upper Ishikari River who chiefly excel in these carved ornamentations. The knife represented in the illustration comes from Kamikawa, and was carved with the point of a knife by the chief of the Ainu there. It took the man many months to accomplish, and it is by far the best specimen of Ainu workmanship that I saw in Yezo, though the ornamentations on it are not purely Ainu in character.
SIDE VIEW. This man was a genius as compared to other Ainu, and his ideas of form and precision were considerably more developed than in most of his race. He has ornamented the sheath with conventionalised symbols, which were apparently suggested to him by leaves and branches of trees; and the suggestion of a flower can be noticed in the upper part of the handle. A suggestion of fish-scales has been used by him to fill up small open spaces; others he filled up with parallel lines. The sheath is made of two parts, to allow the carver to cut the space for the blade inside; but these two parts are well fitted together, and kept fast by six rings of neatly-cut bark fastened on while fresh, so that by shrinking the two sides of the sheath are brought close together, and are as if made of one single piece.
The side view of the same knife shows the clever contrivance for fastening it on to the girdle without removing the latter from around the body. This knife may be ranked among the chefs d'œuvre of Ainu art.