A STUDY OF THE AINU OF YEZO. 207 



tlie women and girls. At the first glance one is deceived into 

 supposing that the young men wear very delicate mustaches 

 and train them carefully ! As there are no written records of 

 any kind among the Ainu, no means of communication except 

 oral, it is impossible to get at anything like a satisfactory 

 explanation of this curious and thoroughly disfiguring custom. 

 The people themselves say that they adopted it from the people 

 whom they found in possession of the land (Yezo) when they 

 came to the island from the West {?). Those people, the Koro- 

 pok-guru, they say were smaller than themselves, and were very 

 soon and easily subjugated ; but, evincing a kindly disposition, 

 and a desire to affiliate with the new-comers, rather than to con- 

 tinue to wage war upon them, they (the Ainu) met their over- 

 tures half-way, ceased to fight them, and adopted some of their 

 customs, one of them being this curious tattooing. The process 

 commences when a girl is about ten years of age. A woman 

 makes a number of small cuts with a sharp knife on the lips 

 and around the mouth, deep enough to cause the blood to flow 

 freely. With some of the blood, and soot obtained by catching 

 on the bottom of an iron pot, or anything else which may come 

 handy, the smoke from burning birch-bark, a paste is made and 

 well rubbed into the incisions. After the resulting inflammation 

 has subsided, a number of blue marks are seen, and the process is 

 continued until the girl becomes a woman, when the mouth pre- 

 sents the appearance of being surrounded by a growth of hair 

 trained into the dainty mustaches of a most consummate dandy. 

 The tattooing around the mouth covers about one half of the 

 lips, so that when the mouth is closed they appear of rather a 

 sickly color. In the mean time the tattoo-marks have been ap- 

 plied to the forehead, and a heavy line drawn just over the bridge 

 of the nose to connect the eyebrows (which are not shaved off, as 

 was the universal custom among the married women of Japan),* 

 and on the back of the hands and up the forearm to the elbow 

 in a rude geometrical pattern. 



Although the Ainu now use Japanese cotton and hemp as ma- 

 terials for clothing whenever they can get them, they still are 

 compelled, at times, to resort to the material called attush. 

 This is " the inner bark of a kind of elm, possibly Ulmus mon- 

 tana of Franchet and Savatier's catalogue of Japanese plants, 

 generally known in Yezo as Oliiyo, but the true Ainu name of 

 which is J-^-ni, attush meaning 'elm-fiber.'" It is thoroughly 

 hackled, then spun (or drawn out into strands), and afterward 



* This custom is rapidly disappearing from the neighborhood of the treaty ports, and 

 to some extent in the interior, as is also the still more disfiguring sign of a married 

 woman, viz., the blackened teeth. With them are going the short queue and partly 

 shaved head of the men. 



