Alone with the Hairy Ainu: Or, 3800 Miles on a Pack Saddle in Yezo and a Cruise to the Kurile Islands

A. H. Savage Landor (1867-1925), the grandson of the author Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), was born and educated in Florence. He abandoned his painting studies in Paris to travel around the world, and visited Asia, the Middle East and South America, supporting himself as he went by painting portraits of people he encountered. Landor became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1892, and a Member of the Royal Institution in 1897. This volume, first published in 1893, deals with his adventurous experiences among the indigenous Ainu, the ‘hairy men’ who lived in the northern ‘home islands’ of Japan and in Sakhalin, the island whose possession was disputed by Japan and Russia for two hundred years. Landor insisted on ‘doing in Ainuland as the Ainu does’. He describes his journey through the Ainu territory and gives a detailed and ethnographically aware account of its people and their culture.