are not looked on with any favour by either.

Attempts have been made by some of the missionaries in Japan to
convert the Ainos to Christianity, but I fear the attempts made in
this direction have been attended with a very scant measure of
success. A people such as this possesses minds of childlike
simplicity, and to endeavour to get it to comprehend the abstruse
doctrines and dogmas of Christianity is an almost hopeless task. The
climate of Yesso is such as to render it possible for missionary
efforts to take place only at certain seasons of the year, and I do
not think there has been, so far as my information goes, any
systematic propaganda of Christianity among this interesting race.

It is certainly a somewhat extraordinary fact that while the other
islands of Japan have been rapidly assimilating and are being steadily
influenced by the civilisation of Europe and America, the northern
island appears to be, except possibly at Hakodate, in a state of
complete isolation from all these influences and effects. Whether the
Ainos have any conception of the influences at work in and the
progress being made by the Empire of which they are subjects, I do not
know, but to me it is both interesting and curious to regard this
ancient and decaying race, either indifferent to or ignorant of all
the bustle and hurry and worry of modern civilisation so close to them
and yet so far removed from their childlike minds and ideas.

The question may be asked, How comes it that a highly civilised people
such as the Japanese have been for many hundreds of years, have
exercised practically no influence upon this subject race inhabiting a
portion of their territory? A nation such as Japan, with a literature
and an art of its own, with two highly developed religious systems,
and with many of those other characteristics which are included in the
term civilisation? How is it that neither art nor literature nor
religion, nor any other characteristic of civilisation has, in the
slightest degree, influenced this aboriginal race? Indeed, if the
theories of ethnologists in regard to the Ainos be correct, and we are
to judge by the ancient remains that have been found throughout Japan,
the Ainos, when they were in undisputed possession of the Japanese
Archipelago, were in a much more advanced condition of civilisation
than they are to-day. The questions that I have put afford food for
reflection, but they are difficult, if not impossible, to answer.