The Days of a Man 1900 



No tide pools were visible, the rocky headlands 

 breaking off vertically; moreover, so heavy a down- 

 pour soon set in that each street became a river, and 

 Mororan had every aspect of complete failure as a 

 collecting station. Snyder therefore proceeded north- 

 westward to Otaru on the Japan Sea, stopping at 

 Sapporo to visit the naturalist, S. Nozawa, at the 

 new government industrial college there, in which 

 Otaki afterward became professor of Fisheries. For 

 An after- myself the only thing apparently worth while was 

 noon off to v i s i t tne little Ainu village of Edomo, four miles 

 away. But it was too damp to walk and the only 

 available horses were wild, unbroken brutes. A 

 boat was then suggested if I didn't mind getting wet. 

 Meanwhile, an Ainu woman with bushy, curly hair 

 and tattooed mustache trotted gayly into town, her 

 tight blue trousers covered with mud - - altogether 

 an amazing freak that made me wish to see more 

 where that one came from. So, buying an oiled-paper 

 blanket and borrowing coat and umbrella, I hired a 

 little sailboat with two fishermen and started out. 



Edomo Edomo squats on an adobe hillside sloping down 



to a gravelly beach. Most of its forty dwellings were 

 overgrown by climbing scarlet beans, while all about 

 grew potatoes and maize, rank and tall. [In the 

 north, by the way, they eat "green corn," but never 

 grind the grain into meal, for the usual Japanese 

 stove is a mere box or pan burning only a few twigs 

 at a time, and thus no food which takes long to cook 

 can be utilized.] The few primitive wooden houses 

 belonged to Japanese fishermen. The huts of the 

 Ainus are made of_ rye-straw, walls and roof alike, 

 and consist each of one large room in the center of 



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