There cannot be anything more vague and destitute of cohesion than Aino religious notions. With the exception of the hill shrines of Japanese construction dedicated to Yoshitsuné, they have no temples, and they have neither priests, sacrifices, nor worship. Apparently through all traditional time their cultus has been the rudest and most primitive form of nature worship, the attaching of a vague sacredness to trees, rivers, rocks, and mountains, and of vague notions of power for good or evil to the sea, the forest, the fire, and the sun and moon. I cannot make out that they possess a trace of the deification of ancestors, though their rude nature worship may well have been the primitive form of Japanese Shintô. The solitary exception to their adoration of animate and inanimate nature appears to be the reverence paid to Yoshitsuné, to whom they believe they are greatly indebted, and who, it is supposed by some, will yet interfere on their behalf.

Their gods, that is, the outward symbols of their religion, corresponding most likely with the Shintô gohei, are wands and posts of peeled wood, whittled nearly to the top, from which the pendent shavings fall down in white curls. These are not only set up in their houses, sometimes to the number of twenty, but on precipices, banks of rivers and streams, and mountain passes, and such wands are thrown into the rivers as the boatmen descend rapids and dangerous places.