Io8 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



nearer 4000 b.c. The next obvious question is, therefore, who were 

 these whalers who built small, half-sunken, round houses, connected 

 by passages and dotted about the foreshore not only of Sakhalin 

 but also of the Kuriles, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and other islands to the 

 south, as well as on the mainland and notably on the coasts of 

 Korea? The answer to this leads us into some strange channels, and 

 finally throws us up on the beaches of Japan some five thousand 

 years later. 



Those strange people, popularly called the "Hairy Ainus," who 

 are still to be found on the island of Hokkaido and on Sakhalin are 

 apparently not, as was at one time supposed, the original inhabitants 

 of the Nipponese archipelago. First, they are basically of Caucasian 

 stock — that is to say, the same race as the early Europeans, or 

 "white man" — and they arrived in far eastern Asia only compara- 

 tively recently, speaking from the anthropological point of view. 

 Their arrival in Nippon was certainly prehistoric, but it was just as 

 certainly not prior to the Neolithic Period, or Late Stone Age. 

 Where they came from we do not know, but they brought with 

 them a number of customs that may be traced back all across Eura- 

 sia to the west, including a "bear cult" that has some strange aspects, 

 to say the least. From archaeological delvings and from certain di- 

 rect evidence given by these Ainus themselves, they were not the 

 first people in the Nipponese archipelago. They, their traditional 

 fables, and the spades of the archaeologists, all tell the same story; 

 namely, that the Ainus found in those islands a dwarf people, or 

 certainly a race of smaller stature than themselves, who were very 

 primitive, were copper-colored, used stone and bone implements, 

 and who either dwelt in caves or built little cavelike round-houses, 

 sometimes joined together like certain wasps' nests. These were 

 sunk about three feet into the ground, and the walls were made of 

 piled and fitted boulders. Above these, some form of domed roof 

 must have been erected and then the whole covered with earth, peat, 

 or some light substance. In these we see an almost exact parallel to 

 the round-houses of the neoHthic peoples of the fringe of western 

 Europe. To clinch the similarity, moreover, Professor Shinji Nishi- 

 mura found whale-vertebrae stools in these primitive mounds, and 

 one of these was actually buried in the same mound in Sakhalin in 

 which the bird-bone tube with whaUng pictures had been found. 



