How an Ainu legend opened a door to a period of our Sun's history ParallaxNick

In 1877, John Batchelor, a 23-year-old Anglican missionary, arrived in the Japanese island of Hokkaido, having fled the malarial climes of British Hong Kong. Upon arrival in the city of Hakodate, he noted the very different people who inhabited that land. Unlike the Japanese, they were hirsute, with wavy brown or black hair and long beards. Their eyes were deep-set, and they carried bows, arrows, and spears. Their language, while containing loanwords from Japanese, was completely unrelated to any other on the planet. They called themselves, and indeed still call themselves, the Ainu. The last remnants of the first culture to inhabit Japan, known as the Jomon, the Ainu survived in their final holdout of Hokkaido for thousands of years, practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Before the arrival of the Japanese in the 17th century, when the students to whom Batchelor had been teaching English at the local Catholic school called the Ainu subhuman, he took offense, but also determined to learn more about them. He rented a house and, under the tutelage of a local chief named Penri, learned their unique language. He eventually compiled an English-Japanese Ainu dictionary, as well as a compendium of their folklore, explaining their various myths and spoken histories. Batchelor would remain in Japan for 64 years, only reluctantly leaving after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In August, 1887, Batchelor learned from an almanac that Hokkaido was in the path of a coming partial solar eclipse. Excited, he fashioned a pair of dark glasses for the viewing and shared them with his Ainu friends. After initial terror at the dying sun, one Ainu recalled a similar event in the time of his father's grandfather's grandfather. Quote, "'The land became dark. Shadows could not be seen. The birds went to roost and the dogs began to howl. The black dead sun shot out tongues of fire and lightning from its sides, and the stars shone brightly. Then the sun began to return to life, and the faces of the people wore an aspect of death. And as the sun gradually came to life, then men began to live again." Unquote. This was such a vivid portrait of a total solar eclipse that this year, a team of astronomers at Nagoya University wondered if it might be based on fact. Exact historical dates are rare in Hokkaido before the Meiji period, so the possibility of precisely timing a fragment of oral history to an astronomical event was a unique opportunity. Thankfully, solar eclipses can be precisely retrodicted, and only three had occurred in the vicinity of Hokkaido within the preceding 300 years. The earliest, in 1636, did not fit the time range specified by the Ainu. The next earliest, in 1742, barely touched Hokkaido, and it was only 98% total. The last, on June 26th, 1824, fit the description and fell within the right time period. The clincher was the description of the sun's corona, tongues of fire and lightning from the sides. Such streamers are indicative of a solar minimum, and the 1824 eclipse fell right at the start of the sun's concurrent solar cycle. This makes the Ainu account one of the few records of solar activity during the Dalton minimum, a 40-year period of low solar activity from the late 18th to early 19th centuries and corresponding drop in global temperatures that may, with the assistance of the Tambora eruption of 1815, have caused the famed year without a summer that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.