Excerpt from Japan Among these hairy people the bear is an animal held in great regard. It is impossible to discover whether this arises from the bear having been an object of worship in other days, but the bear festival is the chief event in their year. In every Aino village the hunters go up to the mountains in spring and bring back a live young bear cub. They hand this over to a woman who nurses and feeds it. When it gets too old to be left loose, it is shut up in a Strong cage, and there kept until the autumn of the year after its capture. N ow comes the time of the great bear festival, and all is excitement in the Aino Village. The hunters gather about the cage armed with knives and spears, with clubs, bows and arrows. The bear has been kept without food for some time and is raging with hunger. This angry mood they heighten by a score of teasing tricks which reduce the bear to a state of fury, then, upon a given signal, the door of the cage is flung open. The bear rushes out and charges upon his tormentors. The latter dash to meet him with equal fury, and assail him with their weapons. A wild struggle follows, and the bear falls under a shower of blows and stabs. The body is cut up, and each family receives a piece, upon which they feast with great delight. If you ask an Aino what this bear feast means he cannot tell you. It is a custom which goes back beyond memory or tradition, and it is the great day Of their year. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.