The hairy Ainu
Sir: I can see, thanks to the scholarship of your correspondent C.R Brand of Edinburgh (14 March) that I have once again been a victim of the fallacy of the eyewitness. In my piece on the islands disputed between Japan and the Soviet Union (21 February) I described their former inhabitants, the hairy Ainu, as 'tall and fairskinned' while Mr or Ms Brand's Columbia Viking Desk Encyclopaedia (3rd edn.) says they are `short, stocky and hairy'. Hoping to catch the doctors disagreeing I checked the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1964 edn, the latest available in the Reuter office in Tokyo) to find that 'short statured and brunette, the Ainu have the most profuse hair of any known human group.' I do not carry either of these bulky works, much less a desk with me in the field, but the inhabitants of the only Ainu village I have visited, Akankokan in Hokkaido, were, I thought, rather on the tall side (they were being gawped at by the Japanese tourists at the time, which may have disoriented trlY sense of tall and short). As to their complexions, well, it iv.as rather difficult to judge under all that hair, and none of them could have been mistaken for Bo Derek's brother, but by and large I thought it was the end of winter, too—they were, on the whole, rather to the lighter than the darker complexioned end of humanity, as Father Divine used to say. MY command of Ainu is poor, and I vvas probably seeing a meeting of albino Ain't discussing the formation of a basketball team. It would have been just my luck to, meet the only swarthy, kind member of the Totenkopf SS. Wiser, I agree, to stick close to one's desk in Edinburgh, reference books to hand, seeing the big picture through the clear northern air. But, I often wonder, where do the infallible experts get their information from?
Murray Sayle
Tokyo, Japan
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