JAPAN’S WILD MEN
No one knows surely the origin of the wild tribes living in the
forest-covered mountains of Formosa. Scientists think they are of the
Malay race and came centuries ago from other islands farther south.
Perhaps they are related to the wilder tribes of the Philippine Islands.
Some people, indeed, believe that the Formosan tribes were originally of
the same race as the Japanese, but that they got lost in the mountains
and remained savages while the others, led by the ancestors of the
Mikado, went on to less mountainous islands and became the civilized
Japanese of to-day. It is true that if you dress one of the wild men of
Formosa in Japanese clothes even a Japanese can hardly tell him from one
of his own people.
Because of this possible race connection the Japanese should have a
double desire to civilize the Formosan natives. The principal reason,
however, for looking after them is to prevent their interfering with
something very important to Japan. There are all kinds of tropical trees
in the great crumpled-up part of Formosa, but one of them is more
important than all the others—the camphor tree. You may know that moth
balls contain camphor, but did you know that six million pounds of
camphor are used every year in making celluloid, two million in
perfumery, a million in drugs, and several million in other ways? When
you discover that the world uses twelve million pounds of camphor every
year for these various purposes, and then find that Formosa produces
nine of those twelve million pounds, you will see why the Japanese were
forced to tame the savages.
The camphor trees grow only in the mountains. There are a few single
trees down on the narrow flat edge of the island, just as there are a
few huge ones about the temples of China. But in order to get even
thousands of pounds of camphor, to say nothing of nine million pounds
every year, the Japanese had to send their camphor gatherers high up
into the mountains. There the wild men used to attack them; even now
they sometimes descend upon a camphor camp and kill the workmen or
destroy the simple machinery.
A Campaign Against Head Hunters
For this reason the Japanese were forced to start a regular campaign
against the wild tribes. The worst of them are head-hunters, like some
of the people living in the wilder parts of the Philippines. The various
tribes have had wars among themselves for centuries, and when they kill
a man they carry home as a souvenir to prove their bravery, not his
scalp, but his whole head! At home the savage lays his enemy’s skull
away in his “skull shelf.” This is made of flat pieces of stone and has
many pigeon-holes, somewhat like the boxes at the post office. In former
times at least, the man who had the most skulls was considered the
bravest, and became chief of the tribe. The Japanese have sent soldiers
into the mountains to destroy the skull shelves, but some of them still
remain.
It is only the men and boys who hunt heads, but the women and girls are
partly to blame. No girl will marry a youth until he has gone out and
killed at least one man and brought home his head. So the young Formosan
who falls in love must hide in the woods along the “guard line” of the
Japanese, and stay there until he can shoot a tame Formosan or a
Japanese or some savage of another tribe than his own. Then he can march
home in triumph, knowing he will no longer be treated as a child by his
tribe or (particularly) by the lady of his choice.
Fencing in the Wild Men
The guard line is a wide cleared strip through the forest, with sentry
posts and provision houses at intervals, and in some places with barbed
wire fences that can be charged with a deadly electric current. When the
Japanese first tried this scheme of fencing in the wild men among their
high mountains, several head-hunters were killed by the electrified
wires. But savages are not fools—they can learn by experience even if
they do not go to school—and those of Formosa soon found that it was
dangerous to touch the wire fences. They have for many generations built
very clever bamboo bridges across the torrents and chasms of their
mountains, so now they build a stile over the electrified fence, or dig
a tunnel under it, and still occasionally take a head on the other side.
No one knows how many they take inside their inclosure.
[Illustration:
The head-hunting savages of Formosa build their houses of flat slabs
of stone.
]
When I was in Formosa, not long ago, the government records showed that
thirteen heads had been taken during that year, not counting those the
head-hunters took from one another. Two of the victims were Japanese.
The others were savages who had submitted to the new rulers and were
allowed to live outside the guard line, or descendants of Chinese
immigrants who lived among the foothills or down on the flat edges of
the island. No one has ever heard of the Formosan savages taking the
head of a white man. Whether this is because they do not consider the
white race enemies or merely because a white man has never come near
enough to risk his head, we are not sure. So far no American or European
has volunteered to go inside the guard line to find out.
As a matter of fact, the Japanese would not allow the traveler to risk
his life among the savages, even if he wished. There are so few white
people in Formosa that it is easy for the government to keep track of
them all, and before the traveler can even visit a camphor camp he must
get permission from the foreign office in Taipeh. It is hard to believe
that the wild tribes are so close to the capital of the island that if
they had field glasses they could almost make out the despised tame
people down in the streets. The places where one is allowed to go into
the mountains are all farther south. Up Arisan, a mountain peak almost
as high as Mt. Morrison, runs a cog-wheel railroad that brings down
valuable timbers from the interior. But as the savages are now almost
tamed in that region, I obtained permission to go instead to a camphor
camp farther north.
My Trip to a Camphor Camp
Early in the morning a servant came to me in the Japanese inn room where
I had spent the night and said that my “train” was waiting at the door.
I found it to be a little wooden platform about five feet square,
mounted on wheels made to run on a track. A kind of chair was fastened
on it. This is what the Japanese call “first class” travel on the little
narrow-gauge railways that run up into the foothills. The main purpose
of these railways is to take supplies to the camphor camps and bring
down the camphor products. The same car without a chair is called “third
class” and is used by the natives, who pay much less than a white man.
My “engine” was a stout coolie, one of the tame immigrant Chinese people
of the coast, who ran behind and pushed the car, now and then jumping on
and riding a little when there was a down grade. For two hours he
trotted across an almost flat plain, nearly all planted with rice. Then
came a village that must have been a division point, for there I changed
“locomotives.” Farther on, where it became more and more hilly, I had
two “engines,” just as our trains do in going through the Rocky
Mountains. Sometimes a man and his wife, dressed so much alike that it
was hard to tell them apart, pushed at the same car. Now and then we met
other push-cars, nearly all loaded with freight. They were shooting down
the mountain side with a man clinging to a kind of baseball bat used as
a brake. As it was a single-track railway, we were in danger of being
hit before a descending car could stop. Because I was a first-class
passenger, the cars we met all had to be lifted off the track to let me
pass, unless they were so heavily loaded that it was impossible, or were
coming down the mountain side so fast that we had to snatch our car off
to avoid a wreck.
It made me think of the difference between the inhabitants to see the
lower hillsides covered with tea bushes in such exact rows as to look as
if the landscape had been tombed with a gigantic comb; while the
mountain tops reminded me of the savages’ uncombed mats of hair. But the
tea plantations from which the famous Formosa tea comes are not so
exciting as the camphor camps higher up, both because tea is grown in
many more parts of the world than camphor is, and because it is only at
the camphor camps that there is any danger.
[Illustration:
A tea plantation in the Formosan foothills. The tea bushes are planted
in long even rows, up among the hills that are too steep and high
for rice, yet not high enough for head-hunters.
]
It was after noon when I reached the camphor camp, a large village of
several hundred people. Most of them had once been savages, but having
surrendered to the Japanese they were allowed to live outside the
electrified guard line. As fast as a new village promises to give up its
head-hunting and behave, the guard line is moved beyond it, so that the
savage territory is gradually becoming smaller.
Civilizing the Savages
[Illustration:
A Japanese teacher and his class of mountain savages. The fathers of
the children were all once head-hunters, and some still are. The
teacher wears a sword because he is an officer of the Mikado. The
man on the teacher’s right was in the same class, the first grade,
as his own small son who stands in front of him.
]
In this camp there was a kind of boarding school for savages. Of the
forty or fifty children of wild men who attended it, nearly all lived in
a row of wooden huts on the edge of the school field. The chief Japanese
teacher wore a white military uniform and carried a sword, and evidently
he was very busy, for he had not shaved in a week. The boys and girls
were dressed in Japanese school costumes—dark skirts over gay kimonos;
but not all the pupils were boys and girls, though this was a primary
school. Some of the men and women savages who could no more read and
write than their children could, had come to school also. In a single
class there were boys of ten and men of twenty; and in what we would
call the first grade a man and his little six-year-old son were both
learning their Japanese letters out of the same book.
A Japanese official who kindly asked me to stay with him while I
remained in the village went out with me later to see some of the wild
men. Most of the afternoon the rain poured in torrents. The paths to the
savages’ houses were narrow trails up steep mountains, and downpours of
rain covered them with mud as slippery as ice. Besides, Formosa is far
enough south to be very warm during the day, even if the nights are cold
high up in the mountains. So this was not an easy trip. At last we came,
soaking wet and smeared with mud, to some one-room huts built entirely
of flat stones, with a crude slate roof on top. Some of the tamer
savages, who worked for the Japanese in the camphor stills, were quite
friendly. They even joked with us, and offered us the long pipes with
tiny bowls that both the men and the women smoked. These particular
savages had completely surrendered, sending their children to the
Japanese schools and themselves working at gathering camphor. Some
become so tame that they go down to the cities, even to Taipeh the
capital, and become rickshaw-pullers.
Not far beyond we found some untamed men. But they did not dare do us
any harm, because they were allowed on the Japanese side of the guard
line only on the understanding that if they started any trouble the
Japanese and Formosan soldiers would treat them like wild animals. The
Japanese like to have a few of the wild men at a time visit their
camphor camps, and even the cities down on the plains if they can be
coaxed that far from home. For they hope in that way to get word to the
people of the mountains that they will have an easier life if they
submit to the new rulers. But there is something in the black eyes of
those visitors which makes one feel that they would like to take a few
heads back home with them.
[Illustration:
Real wild men of the head-hunting tribes of the Formosan highlands.
They looked as if they would not mind taking a head or two home with
them, but before being allowed outside the electric-wired guard line
put up by the Japanese, they had promised to behave in a civilized
manner.
]
How Camphor Is Obtained
[Illustration:
A brick-kiln in Formosa. The bricks made here are much the same as in
southern China, no doubt because the Formosan lowlanders are almost
all descended from Chinese immigrants. The bricks are larger than
ours, dull gray in color, and rather soft.
]
Nothing would have been more interesting than to have gone on up into
the mountains, if the Japanese had allowed it. As they would not,
nothing was left but to see how camphor is gathered. Camphor trees have
become very large during the centuries when only the savages lived among
them. Now they are chopped down, to be cut up into little chips with a
small scoop-shaped ax. These chips are put in bags and carried down to
the push-car railway, from which part are transferred to a steam railway
and taken to the capital. Sometimes the camphor is distilled in the
field, that is, in towns like this one I was visiting. I saw stills
roughly made of mud and bricks and looking like Chinese brick-kilns. In
these the chips are boiled, and the liquid that comes from them is run
through bamboo pipes to be cooled. This colorless camphor oil is put in
tins or cans like those in which American gasoline and kerosene come to
Asia, and is shipped down to Taipeh.
Camphor is a government monopoly in Formosa. Therefore no one can sell
either camphor chips or camphor oil to anyone except to the government
officials in the capital. The Japanese Government puts whatever price it
sees fit on the nine million pounds of camphor furnished to the world
every year. So you see it has been worth while for the Japanese to take
over the island which the Chinese ruled so badly. Whatever else the
visitor to Formosa may see or miss, he should not fail to go through the
warehouses of the Monopoly Bureau in Taihoku, containing tons of
snow-white camphor in great bins. While he wonders how men can shovel
the stuff back and forth all day in air that seems filled with the
pungent odor of millions of moth balls, he will realize why Formosa is
so important a part of the Japanese Empire.
[Illustration: CHOSEN (Korea)]