Chapter XXX

The three principal mountain tribes of Formosa are in turn officially subdivided, for convenience’ sake as much as for any ethnographic reason, into nine groups, besides one semi-civilized tribe living under ordinary district administration among the Formosan Chinese and Hakkas. The latest census, taken partly, I suspect, by absent treatment, estimates the savages at 131,609, and credits them with living in 670 villages, large and small. It should be borne in mind, however, that three or four huts in some little, almost inaccessible clearing may constitute a village in the wild man sense; they do not go in for metropolises. I have my misgivings about the exactness of that final 9 in the population figures, and particularly of the precise 2999 men—with 2753 women—who are still reckoned as “uncontrolled.” Surely the enumerators might have found, or “estimated,” just one more man and made it a round number. However, there are few peoples more meticulous than the Japanese, and they inform us that 47,015 of the mountaineers are “under control and residing within administrative districts,” while 78,842 are “under control, but residing outside administrative districts.” The wisest travelers will probably not take too seriously the word “control” as applied to this last and latest group.

These tribes, who divide themselves into many clans, between which fighting and even head-hunting may be legitimate, hold more than half the island, even without rolling it out level, which would vastly increase their area. Of the three main divisions, the ferocious Taiyals, who tattoo themselves blue in the face, are the fiercest, the most persistent, and the most successful head-hunters; and they hold approximately the northern half of the wild territory. The others, perhaps because man grows less energetic toward the south, are more or less amenable to civilizing influences. Below the precarious trail across almost the center of the island all except some small groups about the foot of Niitakayama, who still occasionally perform barbarous acts, are virtually domesticated; and to-day the Taiyals are the only consistent head-hunters. With them head-hunting is the most important, the most glorious thing in life. Their effete southern neighbors engage mainly in agriculture, legitimate hunting, fishing, and cattle-raising; but the southern half of the mountainous territory is poor, too rugged to be arable in most places, yet even without any great amount of timber except about Arisan and Mount Morrison.

The Ami, through the length of whose district runs the railway on the precipitous east side of the island, are thought to be the most numerous of the nine tribes; but as the chaotic territory of the aggressive and powerful Taiyals has never been fully explored, it is impossible to be dogmatic on this subject. There are a few groups in the heart of the Taiyal region who have never come in contact with the outside world, except by hearsay. But the Taiyal territory is very rich in forest products; the valuable camphor-trees are probably still more numerous and immense as one penetrates into the interior; there is said to be gold—all of which will no doubt eventually be the undoing of these sturdy children of the wilderness. For while the mere desire to make good their claim of ruling over it might never lead even the aggressive Japanese to complete the conquest of Taiwan, the world must have its moth-balls and perfumes, and the camphor-tree grows too slowly to hope that the laying out of camphor plantations by the foresighted Nipponese will save the mountaineers of Formosa from destruction, whether in warfare or by the slower but quite as fatal method of submitting to civilization. Slowly but surely the effeminate non-head-hunting world is pressing in upon them; yearly the guard-line which surrounds them is shrinking.

For the savages are completely fenced in. The _aiyu-sen_, or guard-line, is a cleared space, from fifty to a hundred feet wide, climbing over hill and dale completely around the uncontrolled territory. It is started by cutting a road along the crest of a mountain, then destroying the vegetation on either side of this far enough back so that the guards can see attacking savages in time to defend themselves. This system dates back to the reign of Ch’ien-Lung, toward the middle of the eighteenth century, when the Chinese paid tamed savages to protect them against the others. Corruption grew up, as is inevitable in Chinese affairs, until the settlers were forced to establish guard-lines at their own expense, sometimes hiring the irregular troops commonly, and often erroneously, known in China as “braves,” sometimes doing the guarding themselves, turn and turn about. Similar things exist in many parts of the anarchistic China of to-day. There was little and at times no government supervision, and corruption increased. Those who became chiefs of the guards protected their own property splendidly but had no time to bother with that of others. Very little government guarding remained when the Japanese took over the island. They began by recognizing and paying the semi-public guards, but as soon as they had put down the “Formosan rebels” in the lowlands they took over the corralling of the savages themselves, and now all guards are government employees, members of the police force.

To-day the guard-line is about three hundred miles long. It is constantly being changed, as the Japanese conquer new territory in order to take in more camphor-trees or to punish a district that has grown too insolent to be endured, so that the savages are gradually but surely having their holdings reduced. Not infrequently, thanks to the naïveté of all savages, the Nipponese have reached an agreement with the wild men as to the advancement or the “rectification” of the _aiyu-sen_; sometimes they must fight for it.

This last resort is a hazardous undertaking. The abrupt condition of the mountain fastnesses of the Taiyals in particular is beyond the mere stay-at-home imagination to picture. There are sheer slopes cut with as many as eight hundred steps along the guard-line, almost perpendicular precipices of thousands of feet; sometimes it crosses great chasms by precarious bridges—there is one suspension-bridge of rattan and wire more than four hundred feet long. As water must be carried to the tops of the hills, in sections of bamboo, as well as everything else to be used by the expedition, the work is not only hard but dangerous, many coolies having been killed in the past; and the carriers are rarely volunteers. Hence there is a tithing system by which each village can be made to supply its quota of workmen, though these are paid good Formosan wages. Some of the tamer tribes can be made into baggage-carriers, and there are not a few savages as guardsmen, mostly if not entirely from the southern part of the island. The weather is as treacherous as the savages; sudden mist, torrential rain, and what the Japanese at least consider “bitter” cold, hamper the punitive expeditions. Yet the guards along the _aiyu-sen_ are fighting somewhere more or less all the year around.

Except for the commanders, in comparatively safe places, there are now very few Japanese guardsmen; nearly all of them are Formosans, island-born Chinese or tamed savages, who, at last report, were paid from seven to fifteen yen a month, according to grade and length of service, an allowance during punitive expeditions, and a hundred yen for their grieving families if they were killed in line of duty. A favorite scheme has always been, even before Japanese days, to get one savage village to kill off another by putting a price on the heads taken, thus making it possible for the skull-gatherers to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. The Japanese will tell you that this has never been government policy but that “individual policemen do it, strictly against orders”—the same excuse we heard in Korea, and from our own pacifiers in Haiti. Outspoken Nipponese confess that some of the outrageous acts of the head-hunters, as when they rose one night not many years ago and slew all the Japanese in a border district, are due to the misconduct of the Japanese or Formosan guardsmen, particularly the world-wide and age-old misdemeanor of “fooling with the women.”

As a general rule, given the difference in temperament between the two divisions, suppression is the policy toward the fierce northern tribes and development toward the more gentle southerners, though there are mixtures of the two treatments. The Taiyals are treacherous, like all true savages, as well as ferocious and brave. These tattooed savages of the north had long experience with Chinese authorities before the Japanese came; hence they are adepts at chicanery. They make an agreement with the Japanese to let them into a new district, and then attack their camphor-stills, perhaps destroying the whole camp, cottages and all. When they have been generously filled with _sake_ at some “savage-station” along the guard-line they have often turned upon their “benefactors” and carried their heads home as souvenirs of the festive occasion. There have been some real North American Indian massacres; they have been known to destroy entire Formosan villages; one battle with the Taiyals cost 272 casualties among the Japanese and their assistants—and in savage warfare the dead are far more numerous than the groaning. When these little misunderstandings become acute, the Japanese have two ways of clearing them up,—by sending out a punitive expedition or by blockading the savages, cutting off their right to barter with the outside world until they come to terms. By this latter method they have been made to rebuild camphor-stills and cottages, the whole camp complete.

At very frequent intervals along the _aiyu-sen_ there are gates, a group of police buildings, and three or four guards. Every fourth or fifth of these is a “superintendent’s station,” with a Japanese commander, a doctor, perhaps another official or two. An inspector is in charge of each group of four or five of these superintendencies; there is, of course, a telephone system around the entire guard-line. It is only at these superintendents’ stations that the savages are allowed to barter with the outside world, and that barter is only permitted on condition that they obey the instructions of the authorities, furnish reports on various tribal affairs, and so on. Except for armed expeditions against them, which are costly in money and often in lives, the only effective punishment which the Japanese can mete out to naughty savages is to take away their right to barter their forest products and game for the things they covet or require. If they are good little children their overlords give them agricultural implements, seeds, medicine, medical treatment, and in some cases even allow them guns and ammunition. Neither savages nor those who live outside the guard-line are allowed to pass it without a special permit. Even against wild men with slight requirements and plenty of natural resources, who ought to be able to supply themselves everything they need, this economic pressure is often sufficient to make them behave. When it is not, there is nothing to do but “lose face” or fight.

Head-hunting, like many other sports, is double-edged, and the savages have long been familiar with the thought of losing their own skulls. Hence they are very formidable enemies. The Japanese have constructed bullet-proof, loopholed forts, barbed-wire entanglements, mines, and wire fences, the latter in some places locally electrified by harnessing mountain streams; hand-grenades, sometimes mountain- and field-guns, are used; on the east coast war-ships have occasionally been called upon to subdue belligerent villages. The electric barriers are widely notorious, but even those residents not very friendly to the Japanese admit that they use them to protect themselves, not in the hope of exterminating the savages whom they have not yet succeeded in subjugating. Besides, the savages are nobody’s fools. Perhaps one or two of them electrocuted themselves when the scheme was first introduced, more than a decade ago, but the burnt child of nature also learns to avoid the fire. Now they dig holes under the electrified fence, or build bamboo stiles over it—they are expert bridge-builders, as the many suspension-bridges of rattan and bamboo which they have thrown across great mountain chasms and torrential gorges testify—and men in need of heads come over or under the barrier in the dead of night, or at some momentarily unguarded spot, armed with rifles, with which they are suspiciously well supplied, though spears, long curved machete-like knives, and slender bows and arrows are perhaps more general, and lie in ambush for victims.

But it may be that a more modern method, one that has proved effective in many another land, will do away with the necessity of using armed force to complete the conquest of Formosa: drink is doing for the savages almost as fast as it is for those Americans who cannot bring themselves to accept prohibition. Among the Taiyals also wood-alcohol is said to be almost as free as air—except in price and after-effects. It is rumored that the Japanese are not insisting on complete abstinence in the mountains, and it would be more or less human if they look not too severely upon a certain amount of head-hunting among the tribes themselves, so long as they respect the taboo on those outside the guard-line. For the thinner the population the sooner the mountainous territory will be subdued and the greater the amount of it that can be exploited. The holders of Taiwan promise to set aside reservations for the savages as they take in more of their estate, and probably on the whole they are handling the situation as fairly and humanely and efficiently as we would; as we have, for instance, in Santo Domingo or the Philippines.