Based on the author's own travels, this travelogue/cultural-study book is an interesting reference on traditional Ainu habits and culture as they existed in the early 19th century. The book includes ink-paintings and drawings of various Ainu people and artifacts, as well as an analysis of how their habits differ from area to area, and tribe to tribe. The book also seeks to refute some misconceptions about the Ainu propogated by earlier researchers, however the apparent biases of the narrator to my mind somewhat negate the reliability of his claims.[return][return]The narrator, Henry Savage Landor, was a Victorian-era traveller along the lines of Indiana Jones, or a Jules Verne protagonist- but, without the winning graces of those characters (to his credit, he never attempts to hide this.) Landor shamelessly steals/begs rations and housing from the Ainu during his travels, all the while sneering at them, referring to them as "animals" and using them as unwitting test subjects (one attempt to measure the Ainu tongue sensitivity involved stabbing his sleeping host's tongue with a pencil.) In the course of his travels, he sleeps overnight at a small shrine (stealing the offerings for food,) raids a chief's tomb (ripping off one of the carved knives,) has a one-night(two-nights?) stand with an Ainu maiden, whom he summarily abandons, and ends up with a compound fracture in his ankle after disregarding the locals' advice not to ford a swollen river on foot. (After all, those primitives don't know anything, right? SNAP! ...oh.) His persistent comparison of the Ainu to unevolved apes "incapable of higher thought" and habitual sneering at Christian missionaries' claims of advanced Ainu beliefs renders his statements about the Ainu religion somewhat dubious: Landor dismisses the entirety of the Ainu religion as mere "totemism," insisting that the Ainu intellect is inadequate for higher religious thoughts. While he disparages the notion that the Ainu could believe in an afterlife, he does not seemed to have seriously consulted them on the topic.[return][return]Alone with the Hairy Ainu, to me, served more as an (none-too-flattering!) portrait of the author, interspersed with some tidbits interesting information about Ainu traditional music and arts, and some diagrams of the latter. I would counsel readers to balance this work with more recent research on the Ainu, as his writings- while interesting as a period piece- are rather dated. And I simply can't overstate how insufferably annoying the author is.[return][return]Source: Obtained in ebook format, from Project Gutenberg - 2013. ( )