Takao by day proved to be a small Gibraltar, with a dredged harbor, a
modern Japanese quarter built mainly on reclaimed land on one side of
the little bay, and on the other a Formosan Chinese town of the
customary toned-down disorder and odors, both soon petering out among
some rather barren hills. Monkeys scamper through the shrubbery on the
tops of these, no doubt pausing now and then on a swaying branch to gaze
down upon the works of their more developed but less care-free
prototypes below; palm-trees here and there stand out against the dense
tropical sky-line; flowers grow in a certain profusion in Japanese
gardens and in the modified jungle beyond the outskirts. Seasons vary
greatly within short distances throughout Formosa, and at Takao the
rains come in July and August, even then only in torrential afternoon
showers, so that for all its two and a half degrees of greater
propinquity to the equator life is less dreary there than in constantly
raining Kiirun.
Steamer-loads of timbers from the forests of Arisan in the heart of the
island were being shipped from Takao for the rebuilding of Tokyo. Under
ordinary circumstances Japan furnishes her own lumber and that of
Formosa goes to China and adjacent lands. The Takao coolies handling it
earn an average of a yen a day; farmers and Chinese in the surrounding
country districts get forty _sen_, an improvement on the home-land of
the latter, who are no doubt glad to escape trouble-ridden China at any
price. It is but a short journey across the Formosan channel from Takao
to Amoy—where returning Chinese, armored with Japanese citizenship
picked up in Formosa, which brings with it the rights of
extraterritoriality, make great trouble for the local authorities; but
that is another story. So, too, is the unoccupied group of unpainted
wooden buildings specially erected to house the prince regent during a
recent two-day visit, which are so sacred that they cannot even be
photographed. Nor, thanks to the dreadful secrecy that hangs over all
fortified zones in the Japanese Empire, can the rather pretty scene
below, with the well-laid-out little modern town at one’s feet, the more
haphazard old one across the blue harbor, from out of which through the
miniature Pillars of Hercules a pathetic little knock-kneed Portuguese
steamer under a Chinese captain was just at that moment hobbling,
recalling that once, three or four centuries ago....
Heito, farther south, is also reached by rail, through
pineapple—“groves,” one is inclined to miscall them—with Chinese
well-sweeps to irrigate the rice-fields bizarre against the background
of an immense wireless station. But even when one has come this far
south there is little more to be seen than a standardized Japanese town
in Formosa—southern Formosa, one might specify, since the mouths of all
the non-Japanese population are ugly with betel-juice. Japanese
school-boys and girls, in their respective uniforms and their unfailing
knapsacks, and in strictly segregated groups, step—one might almost say
strut—through the wide, mildly dusty street in the refreshing early
morning or at sun-baked noon, for the youngest of them is quite
conscious that he belongs to the ruling race in this verdant tropical
isle. Formosan children, too, wear a species of uniform when they attend
school, so that at times it is difficult to tell the two races of pupils
apart at a glance; but the self-sufficient air of the one and the
disorganized, straggling temperament of the others, who seldom march in
formation even to or from school, are alone indicative. Meantime their
respective fathers sit languidly in their shops or diligently wield
brush, pen, or typewriter in the office of the local government, drag
laden carts and jog under pole-balanced burdens through the streets, or
sternly patrol them in police uniforms; their mothers either squat and
haggle in the cement-floored market-place or scrape along the pavement
to and from them in wooden sandals, shuffle in kimonos fairly familiar
with the wash-tub about neat little wooden houses with sliding walls,
shaded by a tree or two and brightened by flowers wherever there is
space for a root to gather nourishment, or huddle in Chinese homes of
mud bricks as uncleanly and uncomfortable as the laws of Japan will
allow—all according to the same racial division. Bicycles and lofty,
pneumatic-tired rickshaws flash not too swiftly past; in the outskirts
sway the more than pencil-slender palms without which the streets and
the floors of the Formosan houses could not everywhere be flecked with
reddish patches of drying saliva.
Other cities up and down the tamed and cultivated western side of
Formosa are much like this one, varying mainly in size. Tainan, the
former capital, still preserves the remnants of a solid old medieval
fort as a reminder of Dutch days, and several mementos of the reign of
Koxinga, the pirate chief. Its neighboring wastes, stretching to the
horizon, are divided into shallow fields in which sea-water evaporates
to what looks more like heaps of whitish sand than like the refined
product that finally emerges from them. Three hundred million pounds of
salt a year are taken from the sea on the western coast of Formosa, and
all of it is consumed in Taiwan or Japan. In all these towns, in all
Formosa, one is struck, as in Hokkaido, with the fact that the Japanese
are not pioneers, that they are officials or merchants, government
employees or petty shopkeepers, exploiters or capitalists, but rarely
tillers of the soil or clearers of virgin woodlands.
Tainan has kept perhaps the most evidences of its Chinese origin, but
Shokwa and Taichu, Shinchiku and Toyen have them also. Here and there an
old city gate transformed into a merely ornamental monument recalls the
Chinese walls that once inclosed all Formosan cities; temples confusedly
dedicated to Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-tze, but really sacred to the
myriad devils of the spirit world, draw hordes of joss-burning
adherents; wailing, garish Chinese funerals plod their way through the
unnaturally wide streets, all the ragamuffins of the town carrying some
form or other of the multicolored paraphernalia that must accompany even
these exiled Celestials to their graves. The Chinese sections of these
interior towns have no more cleanliness or conveniences than the
Japanese have forced upon them. Water-carriers do not slop their way
through them from a neighboring river, as in China, because the new
rulers have put street-hydrants within reach of every household. Of
these and a score of other labor- and disease-saving improvements the
typical Chinese would no doubt say that they throw coolies out of work
and leave their families to starve. Similar noises issued from
bartenders and type-setters when prohibition and the linotype forced
their way into our own land. How false the contention is demonstrated by
the appearance of the Formosan Chinese, well fed and clothed in state
compared to the masses struggling for mere existence throughout the
length and breadth of continental China.
It was in Shokwa that misfortune sentenced me to spend a night in a
Formosan inn, thereby bringing out the sharp contrast between this
miserable type of accommodation and the luxury of Japanese hostelries.
It is true that one surrendered one’s shoes at the foot of the
ladder-like stairway leading upward from the earth-floored shop where
the innkeeper sold some noisome form of food, but there any suggestion
of Japanese influence ended. The shoes were forthwith chucked into a
broken-down cupboard along with the footwear of fellow-guests with whom
one would have been quite satisfied not to mingle so intimately, and out
of which one might be fortunate enough to claw them in the morning. How
many generations of unwashed feet had already mounted the unswept stairs
in the decrepit slippers that were offered to those finicky guests to
whom the feet as nature left them are not sufficient I make no pretense
of knowing.
Along the second-story hallway, so narrow that one unconsciously turned
the shoulders sidewise, were several shallow alcoves, almost entirely
taken up with sections of floor raised about three feet above the rest
and covered with thin straw mats. On each of these Chinese notions of a
bed lay a man and a woman, fully dressed, for it is not a Chinese habit
to disrobe merely to sleep, but in no way concealed by the long-unwashed
counterfeits of curtains that hung limply about the openings. All these
fellow-guests were smoking; most of them were quarreling, or at least
conversing in the distressingly querulous voices of Chinese domestic
intercourse; a few of them were already covered with the uninviting
quilt that in most cases constitutes the sum total of Chinese bedding.
But at least there was no bath-room indecency here—for the excellent
reason that bathing was quite foreign to the establishment and, one felt
instinctively, olfactorily, to the general run of its clients. The
nearest approach to the steaming vat of the Japanese was a clogged sink
off a narrow corner of the narrower stairway, in which dishes, clothing,
slop-jars, proprietor, servants, and guests shared indiscriminately a
fouled faucet. In short, my one night in a Formosan inn almost carried
me back to China.