Chapter XX

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.

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.