The savages of Taiwan raise excellent tobacco, profoundly scorning the
Japanese Government Tobacco Monopoly Bureau; they make, and both sexes
smoke, bamboo-root pipes, not of the very long, one-piece type so common
among the Chinese, but much like our corn-cob, the bowl upright on a
small stem. Most of them chew betel-“nut.” They are fond of peanuts,
covering the floors of their “club-houses” with the shells; they grow
some rice and more potatoes, and have a way of preserving the tubers for
long periods. Their low houses are thatched but usually built of slabs
of slate, laid flat, with carved beams under the eaves and, out in
front, a wide veranda, or family club-house, floored with slate or flat
stones, very much like the _paepae_ of the South Seas. Their kitchen
utensils are crude, including some shallow iron kettles, such as are
widely used by the Chinese, and they pound their rice or millet with a
wooden pestle in log-made mortars. Furniture is one of the least serious
of their problems, so long as the family “skull-shelf” is kept in good
condition. Children are carried papoose-fashion, and the bearing of
other burdens, also almost exclusively the privilege of the women, is
done on the back, with a “tump-line” or head-strap across the forehead,
like our North American Indians and so many other primitives throughout
the globe. In fact, it is astonishing how many customs are strikingly
alike among wild people of opposite sides of the earth; at times they
seem almost as unoriginal as their civilized brethren.
Even the women of the domesticated Taiyal head-hunters who hang
about the camphor-camps have their faces tattooed in blue, with two
broad bands in long diagonal lines, like symmetrical cat-scratches,
from the corners of the mouth and nose to where they disappear in
the hair near the ears. This makes them look astonishingly like the
blue-mustache-wearing Ainu women at the other end of the Japanese
Empire, though there is probably no relationship except savagery
between the two races. Sometimes there are short marks of tattooing
on the chin, and usually a column of short horizontal lines down the
middle of the forehead. The men and the older boys have a narrow
strip of horizontal blue lines from the hair to the bridge of the
nose, while there are many individual and tribal variations on the
general custom of making pictorial supplements of their faces. When
the time comes that the youth or girl must be tattooed he or she is
laid out on the ground, or on a reed mat, and experts, usually old
women, strike the blue stuff in with a kind of coldchisel and
hammer. The victim is said never to cry out, but the mother or some
other kind friend generally volunteers to sit on him during the
ceremony.
The tribesmen wear plenty of clothing, which they make themselves; for,
unlike that portion of Formosa which the wild men leave to the weaklings
of civilization, it is by no means always midsummer in the mountains.
The men and the boys in most cases wear a single garment from shoulders
to loins; on cold and rainy days they wrap themselves in a rough-woven
blanket that seems to go entirely around them, like the proverbial
barrel of the clothesless bather. Those who have taken a head wear a
hawk-feather in the top of their own, which is sometimes covered with a
cross between a hat and a cap but is more commonly bare, their long hair
done up in various more or less fantastic forms of coiffure, according
to the tribe, individual vanity, and the proximity of festival-time. The
women, including those who come into the camphor-camps, dress in a loose
kind of skirt and a cloak-waist open under the arms, showing the outer
sides of their breasts. Like all habitual mountain-climbers, unburdened
with shoes, both sexes have overgrown and widely separated great toes.
Most Taiyal belles sport necklaces of what seem to be human teeth. Men
and women alike have various ideas of ear-adornment, such as bamboo
tubes thrust through the pierced and stretched lobes, and more or less
universally deck themselves out in other wild-man forms of ornament.
Some of the chiefs and their wives are very resplendent in their court
regalia.
The plains to the south of the magnificent Taiyal territory are less
inducive to independence of spirit, and both land and people peter out
in interest, the far southerners becoming mere farmers, with many
schools now among them. Some become assistant policemen and even rise to
the height of assistant school-teachers, though they must teach only in
the Japanese language and are considered civilized only in so far as
they take on Japanese manners and point of view. There are still some
small wild tribes scattered through the southern half of the island,
but, in the main, pacification has ended there and development begun.
The Paiwan of the extreme south, a more pleasant-looking people than
most of the others, make crudely carved stone images, vaguely resembling
totem-poles. They cradle their children by hanging them in baskets to
vine-ropes swinging from the branch of a tree. Some of them have so far
deserted their old ways as to build split-bamboo houses somewhat like
those of the Japanese, and after a certain schooling are prone to mix
their own garb with that of their conquerors. They make good guardsmen,
but they, too, had until quite recently their “skull-shelves,” of the
pigeonhole variety, and they still have their club-houses, commonly
built high above the ground on bamboo scaffolding.
Over on Botel-Tobago, one of the many small islands off the coast of
Formosa, there is an extremely primitive race called the Yami. But there
must somewhere be an end to everything, and I beg to be excused the
arduous sea-going labor of visiting the Pescadores, the Kuriles,
far-flung Yap, and the Marshall Islands, so recently forced to give
allegiance to the divine mikado, merely to round out this hasty journey
through some of the nooks and corners of the Japanese Empire.
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