The three principal mountain tribes of Formosa are in turn officially
subdivided, for convenience’ sake as much as for any ethnographic
reason, into nine groups, besides one semi-civilized tribe living under
ordinary district administration among the Formosan Chinese and Hakkas.
The latest census, taken partly, I suspect, by absent treatment,
estimates the savages at 131,609, and credits them with living in 670
villages, large and small. It should be borne in mind, however, that
three or four huts in some little, almost inaccessible clearing may
constitute a village in the wild man sense; they do not go in for
metropolises. I have my misgivings about the exactness of that final 9
in the population figures, and particularly of the precise 2999 men—with
2753 women—who are still reckoned as “uncontrolled.” Surely the
enumerators might have found, or “estimated,” just one more man and made
it a round number. However, there are few peoples more meticulous than
the Japanese, and they inform us that 47,015 of the mountaineers are
“under control and residing within administrative districts,” while
78,842 are “under control, but residing outside administrative
districts.” The wisest travelers will probably not take too seriously
the word “control” as applied to this last and latest group.
These tribes, who divide themselves into many clans, between which
fighting and even head-hunting may be legitimate, hold more than half
the island, even without rolling it out level, which would vastly
increase their area. Of the three main divisions, the ferocious Taiyals,
who tattoo themselves blue in the face, are the fiercest, the most
persistent, and the most successful head-hunters; and they hold
approximately the northern half of the wild territory. The others,
perhaps because man grows less energetic toward the south, are more or
less amenable to civilizing influences. Below the precarious trail
across almost the center of the island all except some small groups
about the foot of Niitakayama, who still occasionally perform barbarous
acts, are virtually domesticated; and to-day the Taiyals are the only
consistent head-hunters. With them head-hunting is the most important,
the most glorious thing in life. Their effete southern neighbors engage
mainly in agriculture, legitimate hunting, fishing, and cattle-raising;
but the southern half of the mountainous territory is poor, too rugged
to be arable in most places, yet even without any great amount of timber
except about Arisan and Mount Morrison.
The Ami, through the length of whose district runs the railway on the
precipitous east side of the island, are thought to be the most numerous
of the nine tribes; but as the chaotic territory of the aggressive and
powerful Taiyals has never been fully explored, it is impossible to be
dogmatic on this subject. There are a few groups in the heart of the
Taiyal region who have never come in contact with the outside world,
except by hearsay. But the Taiyal territory is very rich in forest
products; the valuable camphor-trees are probably still more numerous
and immense as one penetrates into the interior; there is said to be
gold—all of which will no doubt eventually be the undoing of these
sturdy children of the wilderness. For while the mere desire to make
good their claim of ruling over it might never lead even the aggressive
Japanese to complete the conquest of Taiwan, the world must have its
moth-balls and perfumes, and the camphor-tree grows too slowly to hope
that the laying out of camphor plantations by the foresighted Nipponese
will save the mountaineers of Formosa from destruction, whether in
warfare or by the slower but quite as fatal method of submitting to
civilization. Slowly but surely the effeminate non-head-hunting world is
pressing in upon them; yearly the guard-line which surrounds them is
shrinking.
For the savages are completely fenced in. The _aiyu-sen_, or guard-line,
is a cleared space, from fifty to a hundred feet wide, climbing over
hill and dale completely around the uncontrolled territory. It is
started by cutting a road along the crest of a mountain, then destroying
the vegetation on either side of this far enough back so that the guards
can see attacking savages in time to defend themselves. This system
dates back to the reign of Ch’ien-Lung, toward the middle of the
eighteenth century, when the Chinese paid tamed savages to protect them
against the others. Corruption grew up, as is inevitable in Chinese
affairs, until the settlers were forced to establish guard-lines at
their own expense, sometimes hiring the irregular troops commonly, and
often erroneously, known in China as “braves,” sometimes doing the
guarding themselves, turn and turn about. Similar things exist in many
parts of the anarchistic China of to-day. There was little and at times
no government supervision, and corruption increased. Those who became
chiefs of the guards protected their own property splendidly but had no
time to bother with that of others. Very little government guarding
remained when the Japanese took over the island. They began by
recognizing and paying the semi-public guards, but as soon as they had
put down the “Formosan rebels” in the lowlands they took over the
corralling of the savages themselves, and now all guards are government
employees, members of the police force.
To-day the guard-line is about three hundred miles long. It is
constantly being changed, as the Japanese conquer new territory in order
to take in more camphor-trees or to punish a district that has grown too
insolent to be endured, so that the savages are gradually but surely
having their holdings reduced. Not infrequently, thanks to the naïveté
of all savages, the Nipponese have reached an agreement with the wild
men as to the advancement or the “rectification” of the _aiyu-sen_;
sometimes they must fight for it.
This last resort is a hazardous undertaking. The abrupt condition of the
mountain fastnesses of the Taiyals in particular is beyond the mere
stay-at-home imagination to picture. There are sheer slopes cut with as
many as eight hundred steps along the guard-line, almost perpendicular
precipices of thousands of feet; sometimes it crosses great chasms by
precarious bridges—there is one suspension-bridge of rattan and wire
more than four hundred feet long. As water must be carried to the tops
of the hills, in sections of bamboo, as well as everything else to be
used by the expedition, the work is not only hard but dangerous, many
coolies having been killed in the past; and the carriers are rarely
volunteers. Hence there is a tithing system by which each village can be
made to supply its quota of workmen, though these are paid good Formosan
wages. Some of the tamer tribes can be made into baggage-carriers, and
there are not a few savages as guardsmen, mostly if not entirely from
the southern part of the island. The weather is as treacherous as the
savages; sudden mist, torrential rain, and what the Japanese at least
consider “bitter” cold, hamper the punitive expeditions. Yet the guards
along the _aiyu-sen_ are fighting somewhere more or less all the year
around.
Except for the commanders, in comparatively safe places, there are now
very few Japanese guardsmen; nearly all of them are Formosans,
island-born Chinese or tamed savages, who, at last report, were paid
from seven to fifteen yen a month, according to grade and length of
service, an allowance during punitive expeditions, and a hundred yen for
their grieving families if they were killed in line of duty. A favorite
scheme has always been, even before Japanese days, to get one savage
village to kill off another by putting a price on the heads taken, thus
making it possible for the skull-gatherers to kill two birds with one
stone, as it were. The Japanese will tell you that this has never been
government policy but that “individual policemen do it, strictly against
orders”—the same excuse we heard in Korea, and from our own pacifiers in
Haiti. Outspoken Nipponese confess that some of the outrageous acts of
the head-hunters, as when they rose one night not many years ago and
slew all the Japanese in a border district, are due to the misconduct of
the Japanese or Formosan guardsmen, particularly the world-wide and
age-old misdemeanor of “fooling with the women.”
As a general rule, given the difference in temperament between the two
divisions, suppression is the policy toward the fierce northern tribes
and development toward the more gentle southerners, though there are
mixtures of the two treatments. The Taiyals are treacherous, like all
true savages, as well as ferocious and brave. These tattooed savages of
the north had long experience with Chinese authorities before the
Japanese came; hence they are adepts at chicanery. They make an
agreement with the Japanese to let them into a new district, and then
attack their camphor-stills, perhaps destroying the whole camp, cottages
and all. When they have been generously filled with _sake_ at some
“savage-station” along the guard-line they have often turned upon their
“benefactors” and carried their heads home as souvenirs of the festive
occasion. There have been some real North American Indian massacres;
they have been known to destroy entire Formosan villages; one battle
with the Taiyals cost 272 casualties among the Japanese and their
assistants—and in savage warfare the dead are far more numerous than the
groaning. When these little misunderstandings become acute, the Japanese
have two ways of clearing them up,—by sending out a punitive expedition
or by blockading the savages, cutting off their right to barter with the
outside world until they come to terms. By this latter method they have
been made to rebuild camphor-stills and cottages, the whole camp
complete.
At very frequent intervals along the _aiyu-sen_ there are gates, a group
of police buildings, and three or four guards. Every fourth or fifth of
these is a “superintendent’s station,” with a Japanese commander, a
doctor, perhaps another official or two. An inspector is in charge of
each group of four or five of these superintendencies; there is, of
course, a telephone system around the entire guard-line. It is only at
these superintendents’ stations that the savages are allowed to barter
with the outside world, and that barter is only permitted on condition
that they obey the instructions of the authorities, furnish reports on
various tribal affairs, and so on. Except for armed expeditions against
them, which are costly in money and often in lives, the only effective
punishment which the Japanese can mete out to naughty savages is to take
away their right to barter their forest products and game for the things
they covet or require. If they are good little children their overlords
give them agricultural implements, seeds, medicine, medical treatment,
and in some cases even allow them guns and ammunition. Neither savages
nor those who live outside the guard-line are allowed to pass it without
a special permit. Even against wild men with slight requirements and
plenty of natural resources, who ought to be able to supply themselves
everything they need, this economic pressure is often sufficient to make
them behave. When it is not, there is nothing to do but “lose face” or
fight.
Head-hunting, like many other sports, is double-edged, and the savages
have long been familiar with the thought of losing their own skulls.
Hence they are very formidable enemies. The Japanese have constructed
bullet-proof, loopholed forts, barbed-wire entanglements, mines, and
wire fences, the latter in some places locally electrified by harnessing
mountain streams; hand-grenades, sometimes mountain- and field-guns, are
used; on the east coast war-ships have occasionally been called upon to
subdue belligerent villages. The electric barriers are widely notorious,
but even those residents not very friendly to the Japanese admit that
they use them to protect themselves, not in the hope of exterminating
the savages whom they have not yet succeeded in subjugating. Besides,
the savages are nobody’s fools. Perhaps one or two of them electrocuted
themselves when the scheme was first introduced, more than a decade ago,
but the burnt child of nature also learns to avoid the fire. Now they
dig holes under the electrified fence, or build bamboo stiles over
it—they are expert bridge-builders, as the many suspension-bridges of
rattan and bamboo which they have thrown across great mountain chasms
and torrential gorges testify—and men in need of heads come over or
under the barrier in the dead of night, or at some momentarily unguarded
spot, armed with rifles, with which they are suspiciously well supplied,
though spears, long curved machete-like knives, and slender bows and
arrows are perhaps more general, and lie in ambush for victims.
But it may be that a more modern method, one that has proved effective
in many another land, will do away with the necessity of using armed
force to complete the conquest of Formosa: drink is doing for the
savages almost as fast as it is for those Americans who cannot bring
themselves to accept prohibition. Among the Taiyals also wood-alcohol is
said to be almost as free as air—except in price and after-effects. It
is rumored that the Japanese are not insisting on complete abstinence in
the mountains, and it would be more or less human if they look not too
severely upon a certain amount of head-hunting among the tribes
themselves, so long as they respect the taboo on those outside the
guard-line. For the thinner the population the sooner the mountainous
territory will be subdued and the greater the amount of it that can be
exploited. The holders of Taiwan promise to set aside reservations for
the savages as they take in more of their estate, and probably on the
whole they are handling the situation as fairly and humanely and
efficiently as we would; as we have, for instance, in Santo Domingo or
the Philippines.