Chapter XXV

The Taiwan of to-day is a military and commercial outpost of the Japanese Empire. The visitor who erroneously mistakes it for anything else exposes himself to surprise if not to disappointment. The Japanese rule Formosa for the benefit of the Formosans exactly so far, and not a hair’s-breadth farther, as it is to the advantage of Japan and the Japanese to do so. Though it may appear otherwise on paper, the supremacy of the civilian authority is quite nominal, and one constantly feels the influence of the real military rulers underneath. Let a dispute on policy arise between these two factors and there is never the iota of a doubt as to which one will impress its will over the other. Economically the island is as strictly under Japanese exploitation for the Japanese as it is politically under the rule of Japanese militarists.

What are erroneously called Formosans make up the great bulk of the population of the island. When the Japanese came thirty years ago this Chinese element, whose connection with the island for the most part dates back only a few generations, was reckoned at three million; to-day the “Formosans of Chinese race holding Japanese registration” number about half a million more than that. The most casual observer cannot but quickly note that these so-called Formosans are really exiled Celestials. Their temples, their graves, their superstitions, their costumes, almost their every point of view toward life or death are those of China, of the adjoining Fukien coast in particular, modified only in minor degrees by their longer or shorter sojourn in this semi-tropical isle. I found no one ready to testify that there are still in Formosa Chinese or Hakkas of cannibalistic tastes; but few on the other hand were ready absolutely to deny it. Such things still exist here and there in China, at least in times of famine. As in China, too, and by no means confined to the lowest classes, in fact probably less prevalent, per capita, among them, is the equally unpraiseworthy practice of living on a wife’s immorality. The Chinese are always picturesque in their phrasing, and the house in which such things occur is known among the neighbors as the “half-closed gate,” while the man who hires out his women is gently referred to as a “guest husband.” Those Formosan Chinese who can afford the expense involved, or who cannot otherwise acquire the male heir necessary to carry on their precious family and the worship of its ancestral tablets, take concubines. Class distinctions are also much the same as across the channel; actors, barbers, butchers, chiropodists, funeral musicians and servants are regarded with contempt, as outcasts whom no respectable woman will marry. Among countless other details going to show that the Formosans are merely transplanted Chinese is the fact that they will tell missionaries who come to work among them what extraordinarily distinct Chinese they speak, what wonderful linguists they must be to have learned the miserable language of the speakers so perfectly—and then turn around to ask the missionary’s teacher what on earth these western barbarians are trying to say.

I ran across several of the Protestant missionaries, of British nationality, scattered about Formosa, and one day I chanced upon a Spanish priest who had been nearly forty years in the island. These two branches of proselyters were far more in agreement upon the good and bad effects of Japanese rule than is ordinarily the case on controversial questions between the two principal divisions of Christianity. The delight at speaking his native tongue, which he had to a noticeable degree forgotten, partly accounts no doubt for his greater picturesqueness of language and the emotion that spread in ripples down the long white beard of the padre of—but I must not be too specific. Suffice it to say that he had been stationed in one of the larger interior cities since some years before the Japanese took over the island.

He had found all Japanese with whom he had ever come in contact intellectually slow as compared with the Formosans, even when they were better educated. Yet the more stupid Japanese always gets any available government job first, he went on, can rise higher, and is paid from fifty to eighty per cent. more for the same work than Formosans. Until quite recently the Japanese man who married a Formosan became himself a Formosan, but the Formosan woman who married a Japanese did not attain Japanese citizenship. Japanese life, the padre asserted, is ostentatious with modern superficial improvements,—roads, schools, hospitals, sewers, running water, electricity, the telegraph and the telephone—he spoke of these things with the scorn which the Spanish as a race still feel for them—but as soon as you dig under the surface of all this.... There is far more immorality of all kinds than in the old pre-Japanese days. Merchant ethics are much lowered; Formosan girls of the class which a generation ago would have been immaculate in social behavior parade the streets in gay, insufficient garb, most of them ready at anything like sufficient provocation to give or sell their favors to any male who longs for them.

I had myself seen no small number of these Formosan “flappers,” girls above the peasant and coolie class, gaudy and conspicuous in their numerous hair ornaments, their flower-embroidered silk jackets, and trousers reaching hardly below the knees—perhaps this was what the padre referred to as “insufficient”—their silk stockings ending in little gay-colored cloth shoes. There is scarcely any foot-binding, by the way, among the younger generation in Formosa; the Japanese do not actually forbid it, but the southern coast of China, from which most “Formosans” come, is not greatly given to the custom so nearly universal elsewhere in the former Manchu Empire. But from personal experience I only knew that there was more spontaneous gaiety, more freedom of life in the Western sense, among this new generation of the downtrodden sex. The padre insisted that I had not delved deeply enough into the situation. Perhaps I lack the keen Latin flair for such things. There are also in Formosa, it seemed, many Japanese women of not the strictest morals, but as they confine their affections to their own race, the priest was evidently not much worried by them.

Certainly Formosa has made rapid strides for the better in most things material, he admitted; certainly the Japanese had done away with banditry and made it safe for any one, whom they are willing shall do so, to go anywhere in the island—outside the wire fence that incloses the head-hunters. Even the Protestant missionaries who were there before the change, often harsh but fairly just critics, in a position to know whereof they speak, hasten to bring the Japanese that mead of praise. But “in matters moral and spiritual,” some of them go on, “we fear there has been no progress”; or, “materially Formosans are undoubtedly better off under the Japanese; morally they are undoubtedly worse.” Prostitution, for instance, virtually unknown in polygamous Formosa, was introduced by the new rulers, as was to be expected, legalized through the Japanese form of segregation, and “has brought moral disaster to many of the inhabitants of Taiwan, Japanese as well as Formosans.”

There are more than enough schools in Formosa, the priest went on, sumptuous ones at that—for the Japanese. There have never been enough for the Formosans, and wherever it is possible to avoid building new ones for them they are assigned to old Confucian temples and the like. Primary schools for the Japanese and the Formosans are separate, but the Formosan children must learn Japanese, since teachers are forbidden to give their classes in the “Formosan language,” a Fukien dialect most nearly resembling that of Amoy. In other words, no Formosan child can go to a government school unless he can speak Japanese, and henceforth, according to a new ruling, no more private schools can be opened. There are still a few tutor schools, but even in these some Japanese must be taught. The Catholics have given up attempting to have schools for their parishioners in Taiwan, and in the humble opinion of the Spanish padre the Protestant missionaries are wasting money on them. It is forbidden to mention religion in the class-room. The Protestant mission school in Taihoku is quite an institution, however, and there the Formosan language is mainly used. But, as in Korea, the knowledge of the old classics is rapidly disappearing from the island. Missionaries vehemently assert that a Formosan university is badly needed, because Formosan youths sent to Japan to complete their education come back badly corrupted in morals. The Japanese probably have another idea on the subject, such as,—what is a little looseness of morals compared with a chance to impress with the greatness of the “mother-country,” to Japanize, the new generation in Formosa?

Plagues have been wiped out, my Spanish informant continued, but there is more consumption, and more diseases of the brothel. There are fewer poor Formosans now than before the Japanese came, but fewer rich also. Personally I should list this among the improvements, but the priest gave it as an example of Japanese exploitation. The poor people have more money in silver or paper under the new order of things, but not so much in food. Perhaps so, yet one gets the impression that merely the numerous good trains in which a formerly house-bound population may run about the island at will tend to make life less drab; and certainly the number of popular excursions and travels for pleasure bear out the notion. One of the padre’s bitterest complaints was that all foreigners, however long they may have been in the island and however altruistic the labor they may have done for its people, are incessantly looked upon with suspicion by the Japanese. Every time he left town to visit one of his out-stations, when he went on any journey whatever, he had to give the police authorities detailed information as to where, when, and why he was going; and still they never failed to send spies behind his back to ask whom he had talked with, what he had said, and so on to the end of patience. Rumors, which, he had many proofs, were instigated by the authorities, scared the timid natives away from Christianity; by their spy methods, by making fun, or worse, of the children who go to church, they made conversion impossible. Yet the same authorities constantly assert that there is complete religious liberty wherever the mikado rules—a yarn for outside consumption.

Certainly there were too many points of similarity between his complaints and those one hears in Korea to dismiss them all as the false impressions of an overworked zealot. The mass of the Japanese, particularly those in official positions, do not look with favor upon the advance of Western religion, and with it Western notions of political liberty, in their possessions. On the other hand I have known Protestant missionaries in Formosa to say that “we question whether any country enjoys a larger measure of religious liberty than do the Formosans. Unfortunately, like the people from which they sprang, indifference to the moral demands of any practical religion are manifest; often the most ardent devotees of what to them is religion are the most immoral persons in their districts.”

Some Formosan men adopt the Japanese custom, especially the footwear, and, being taller and more stately in appearance, look strange indeed. I cannot recall ever having seen a Korean in _getas_ and kimono. Have the Formosans forgotten the disgrace of being conquered; do they live farther enough south to be more easy-going, or was there less of the old Chinese culture and pride of race among these comparative immigrants, so that they never did much care that they are ruled by an alien race? Missionaries and other foreigners, long residents in the island and familiar enough with its language to know something of the minds of the people, assert that the Formosans really hate the Japanese, but that the new generation is so used to them that, thanks to the passiveness, not to say fatalism, in the Chinese character, they do not actively think of what life would be without them. Besides, if they are at all in touch with their ancestral home-land the former Amoy coolies who make up so large a proportion of the population of Formosa probably prefer some Japanese exactitude, much as it may grate on their nerves, to being robbed or impressed into unpaid service by bandits and soldiers across the channel. Thus, while there is very much of a “Korean question” and, only two hundred miles south of Formosa, an active “Philippine question,” there is apparently no longer a “Formosan question.” Independence, if it is ever considered at all in Taiwan, is evidently regarded as hopeless, not even worth thinking about.