THE KURILSKY AINU 
23 
contact with Japanese, nearly all the young girls 
with any pretensions to good looks become concu¬ 
bines of Japanese. As such they often change their 
masters, and are not encouraged to bear children. 
After they have lost their freshness and are no longer 
attractive, they marry an Ainu husband, and the 
children of such unions, as may be supposed, are 
limited in number. So far as my observation ex¬ 
tends, an Ainu girl prefers to become the mistress 
of a Japanese rather than the wife of one of her own 
people. A Japanese as a rule can house, feed, and 
clothe her better, besides providing her with many 
little luxuries which an Ainu husband could not 
possibly afford. The offspring of Japanese and 
Ainu marriages are not long-lived. It is said they 
usually die out in the second generation. This is 
probably true, for there is little, if any, trace of Ainu 
blood in the northern Japanese. 
During my stay on Yetorup in 1875, the Japanese 
resident doctor informed me that when the Japanese 
first came to the island, about a hundred years 
before, some 1,500 Ainu lived there. They were 
a fine, strong, healthy lot of people living chiefly on 
bears, seals, sea-lions, sea-otters, and fish, the roots 
of several wild plants, berries, and sea-birds and 
their eggs, a plentiful supply of all these being easily 
obtained in their due seasons. From the advent of 
the Japanese their numbers gradually decreased, 
until at that time (1875) there were less than 450. 
He also informed me that about seventy years 
previously (1805), two Hitotsubashi Yakunin (Jap¬ 
anese officials) were sent to Yetorup to take up 
their quarters. These were the first officials to reside 
on the island. The first was stationed at Oito, but 
