Had I come directly from Japan proper to Formosa, instead of by way of
several months in China, my impression of its Japaneseness might not
have been so acute. But that interim in the quite different, even though
neighboring, land of Confucius made the changes which its present rulers
have wrought upon the long-Chinese island during the thirty years since
they took possession of it stand out in striking relief. No doubt a
journey in the reverse order, from Japan through Formosa to China, would
have emphasized instead the likenesses between the island and the former
Celestial Empire. For at least in its thickly inhabited western
coastland Formosa is still as much Chinese as Japanese, and the
little-accessible mountainous bulk of the country is a world apart,
where neither of the great nations chiefly concerned in the history of
the island has left many traces.
A cross-wave journey from Foochow through the habitually turbulent
waters of the shallow Formosan channel kept our small Japanese steamer
rolling like the proverbial log, all night and all day, to the very
mouth of Kiirun Harbor. After the often Elysian freedom of life in
China—for the foreigner enjoying the rights of extraterritoriality—the
realization came almost with a shock that I was back in a mikado-ruled
land again. The literal-minded little police officer, for instance, who
kept me courteously but firmly imprisoned on the ship during the two
hours necessary to telephone the “foreign office” in the capital and get
me “special permission” to land, because some _t_ or _i_ in my passport
had not been properly crossed or dotted, called attention to a grave
error in my guide-book. Cameras, he carefully pointed out, are not
merely “regarded with suspicion in Kiirun,” as the red-faced volume had
it, but they are strictly forbidden! In fact, most of his conversation
during that stupid two hours was on this important point. I trust the
ordinarily exact, though often human, compiler thereof will take care in
future not to permit other serious mistakes of this description to sully
his excellent pages. The notion that the writer might have meant the
statement to be mildly facetious could not, of course, have occurred to
a matter-of-fact little Nipponese mind.
Luckily there are fourteen passenger-trains a day to the capital,
eighteen miles inland from Keelung—as in Korea most places in Formosa
have two names, for the Japanese and their neighbors will never agree on
the proper pronunciation of the same ideographs, and _l_ is as great a
bugbear to one race as _r_ is to the other. The weather, too, was kind;
for though this northern and chief port of the island boasts itself one
of the rainiest spots on earth, with some twelve feet of rainfall a
year, there was nothing worse during the hour I waited for the next
train than a sincere promise of rain soon to come. Not that a deluge
would have mattered much; there is very little of interest in Kiirun for
the mere wanderer, except those fourteen trains,—a small bay with a
breakwater, several unphotographable forts, some quite modern streets
lined by brick Japanese-Western hybrid-looking buildings that are both
shops and residences, all closely surrounded by lightly jungled hills,
was all that appeared on the surface before the train sped away with me
still in time to have luncheon in the capital. There are also fourteen
daily trains back from there to Keelung, which somehow suggests that the
capital was purposely built within scampering distance of the coast, an
impression that is enhanced by the discovery that there is a village of
the head-hunting Taiyal tribe within five miles of it.
Taipeh or Taihoku, Japanese capital of Formosa, is often mentioned as
the most modern city in Japan. There was no difficulty in compelling the
Chinese or Formosan inhabitants of the island to tear down wherever
improvements were desirable, whereas the same thing does not quite apply
to the Japanese at home. Physically at least it is nearly all that a
city should be, an astonishing place for the Far East and almost within
the tropics. Spreading over a large area, with wide, well-paved
streets—far too wide and hard, in fact, for this latitude—with fine
parks, splendid government buildings, a great botanical garden out in
the southern suburb, it is indeed in many ways better than most Japanese
cities, and an improvement on no small number of American ones.
Certainly the Chinese quarter has nothing like the filth of the least
dirty of purely Chinese towns and it is probably cleaner than some
tenement districts of New York.
[Illustration: The business streets of Taihoku and other modernized
cities throughout Formosa are lined by shady and more or less cool
arcades]
[Illustration: Japanese field-day in the streets of the Formosan
capital]
[Illustration: Formosan ladies of the well-to-do class]
[Illustration: It takes a sharp eye to tell the country women of Formosa
from their husbands and brothers, since there is almost complete
equality of garb and work]
Yet Taihoku gives one a queer, almost an uncanny feeling, after months
in China; for here all is orderliness in complete contrast to Chinese
disorder on the other side of the channel, a Prussian exactness which
Prussia never attained. Japanese life makes one direct from China feel
very staid and orderly. The Nipponese, it is quickly impressed upon such
a visitor, hate any suggestion of irregularity as bitterly as the
Chinese seem to love it. One wonders that the orderliness, the almost
military discipline of life, does not get even on Japanese nerves.
Formosa has not been under martial law for years, yet military
precision, perhaps unconsciously, reigns everywhere. The “foreign
office,” outwardly courteous and inwardly suspicious of strangers, sent
a graduate of the Middle School to show me about the city, and he was
visibly distressed whenever we fell out of military step—or rather, when
I did. That is the atmosphere of all Taihoku. Even little school-girls,
in their uniform garb, their uniform knapsacks hung just so over one
shoulder, walk like trained soldiers, some in wooden _getas_ that scrape
noisily along the modern macadam, more of them with shoes, the heels of
which strike the pavement with hard Prussian exactness. The very streets
dare not deviate from their fixed course; the bicycles rolling silently
along them seem to steer by the compass; the big foreign horses on which
diminutive, solemn-faced Japanese men bob like manikins jog with formal
punctiliousness; the parks, the botanical gardens are laid out
precisely; one has the feeling that the big fish in their artificial
ponds dare not caper except as provided by law. Every article in the
fine shops beneath the precise shady arcades that flank every business
street has the air of being in its exact place; the very leaves on the
trees that fill the city with such a profusion of vegetation compared
with wood-greedy China seem to hang in a prescribed way; even the
mountains in the near eastern distance look orderly, though that of
course is illusion, for there disorderly head-hunters reign supreme.
With the Nipponese worship of discipline how those head-hunters must
grate on Japanese nerves!
Perhaps those recent months in haphazard China lead me to exaggerate;
but at least the Japaneseness of Taihoku is striking. Uniforms or
European clothes with Japanese modifications cover most men; even the
women are considerably given to more or less Western dress, for the
silken _obi_ and the professional hair-dresser are often out of reach in
these days of inflated prices. But _judo_, which we know better as
jiu-jitsu, and the _samurai_ style of fencing, seem to be the favorite
sports—or, since the Japanese looks upon these games with almost sacred
patriotism, let us call them the chief forms of personal physical
discipline. “Annonei! An-n-no ...” and “So des-ka!”, the “moshi-moshi”
of the telephone-booth, the whistling intake of breath without which the
typical Japanese cannot reflect on the slightest subject, are heard
everywhere. The revered shrine of Taiwan Jinsha, of a branch sect of
modern Buddhists, overlooking a big lotus pond from the base of a wooded
hill in Maruyama Park, might have been brought bodily from Kyoto; the
few Shinto temples scattered about the city exude a Japanese cleanliness
which would be wholly incompatible with a Chinese place of worship.
Rickshaws, commonly the traveler’s first personal contact with any city
of the Far East, are much higher, both in build and price, than in
China. One feels up in the air in them—and correspondingly let down when
the time comes to pay them off. Even the rickshaw-men are all in
uniform,—clean and whole jacket-shirt and trousers, white even to their
mushroom hats, an extraordinary contrast to the cheerful ragamuffins
across the channel. Here the runners are all Formosans, that is, Chinese
immigrants of not more than a few generations back, occasionally
interbred with the aborigines, or sometimes pure “reclaimed” savages who
not long since “were seeking whom they might decapitate,” but who have
left off head-hunting for the less picturesque vice of yen-hunting.
There is nothing in the appearance of any of them, however, to suggest
anything but cleaner, better paid, very much more disciplined Chinese.
Formosans in general seem to be merely domesticated, repressed, quieted,
and more frequently bathed Celestials, with here and there some
aboriginal blood in their veins.
There are no tramways in Formosa, so that the capital is astonishingly
quiet for so large a city; there are said to be a hundred and twenty
thousand Formosans and half as many Japanese in it. Evidently the
rickshaw-men are not allowed to solicit fares, and do so only in low
tones and cautiously, so that after dark they remind one of the slinking
women of the night who prowl the streets in too many of the cities of
the West. This is a contrast indeed to noisy China, where a howling mob
of human horses surges pell-mell down upon every possible client, and
where at least one of them is always shrieking along in the wake of the
foreigner who dares to walk a block. Here, even as they run, they make
scarcely a sound. But they expect at least eighty _sen_ an hour, four
yen a day, and are correspondingly slower than their Chinese
counterparts. The rule is not absolutely fixed, but still it is a rule
in the East that the more you pay a coolie of any calling the less work
you get out of him. Besides, the rickshaws themselves, made of necessity
in Japan, cost from three to five hundred yen, against eighty dollars
“Mex” in Peking, so that the cleaner uniforms and the better-fed bodies
are not the only reasons for the higher charges.
But that is one of the sad things about Formosa under the Japanese:
prices are approximately twenty-five per cent higher than in Japan
itself, and to the traveler from China they are atrocious there. With
all its excellencies, too, there is scarcely a hint of picturesqueness
about Taihoku. The imposing Japanese hotel for foreigners is sumptuous,
but absurd in its charges, distressingly standardized and chiefly full
of emptiness, like so many of Korea and Japan proper. It, too, owes its
predicament largely to that American hotel-man of price-fixing
temperament, for it belongs to the iniquitous hotel association that
standardizes life for the Occidental traveler throughout the Japanese
Empire, and makes living seem a luxury rather than a mere necessity.