Word: ainu
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...Texas, diggers under Robert T. Stephenson of the Smithsonian found "ceremonial pits" 90 feet across and ten feet deep. In one was the skeleton of a bear, laid out with a full ceremonial burial. Apparently the Trinity River Indians worshiped or otherwise honored bears, as did the hairy Ainu of northern Japan...
...known that the more than half-million Okinawans would constitute a major problem. Whether they would be friendly or hostile had not been known. These first people, once their fear quieted, seemed friendly and docile enough. In their behavior there seemed reason to hope that in Japan's Ainu strain, a people might be found ready to reject the militarism of the Japanese and live at peace with the world...
...Ainu (popularly known as the hairy Ainu), some 16,000 of them, inhabit northern islands of Japan. A few live on the half-Soviet island of Sakhalin. How they got there is one of anthropology's darkest mysteries. Last week the Smithsonian Institution reported to the U.S. the findings of Russian Anthropologist Lev Yakolevich Sternberg...
Said the Smithsonian: Ainu women, properly dressed, could stroll unnoticed along any U.S. Main Street. Ainu men are hairy and large-headed, with faces strikingly like those of Leo Tolstoy, Alfred Tennyson, or Orson Welles. The almost beardless Japanese point to the Ainus' hirsuteness as evidence of subhuman status...
...their customs is pure Ainu: To raise and nourish bear cubs intended for religious sacrifice, Ainu women suckle them. This sacrificial throat-cutting is supposed to release divine spirits...