Chapter XXIII

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.