Chapter XXXII

The savages of Taiwan raise excellent tobacco, profoundly scorning the Japanese Government Tobacco Monopoly Bureau; they make, and both sexes smoke, bamboo-root pipes, not of the very long, one-piece type so common among the Chinese, but much like our corn-cob, the bowl upright on a small stem. Most of them chew betel-“nut.” They are fond of peanuts, covering the floors of their “club-houses” with the shells; they grow some rice and more potatoes, and have a way of preserving the tubers for long periods. Their low houses are thatched but usually built of slabs of slate, laid flat, with carved beams under the eaves and, out in front, a wide veranda, or family club-house, floored with slate or flat stones, very much like the _paepae_ of the South Seas. Their kitchen utensils are crude, including some shallow iron kettles, such as are widely used by the Chinese, and they pound their rice or millet with a wooden pestle in log-made mortars. Furniture is one of the least serious of their problems, so long as the family “skull-shelf” is kept in good condition. Children are carried papoose-fashion, and the bearing of other burdens, also almost exclusively the privilege of the women, is done on the back, with a “tump-line” or head-strap across the forehead, like our North American Indians and so many other primitives throughout the globe. In fact, it is astonishing how many customs are strikingly alike among wild people of opposite sides of the earth; at times they seem almost as unoriginal as their civilized brethren.

Even the women of the domesticated Taiyal head-hunters who hang about the camphor-camps have their faces tattooed in blue, with two broad bands in long diagonal lines, like symmetrical cat-scratches, from the corners of the mouth and nose to where they disappear in the hair near the ears. This makes them look astonishingly like the blue-mustache-wearing Ainu women at the other end of the Japanese Empire, though there is probably no relationship except savagery between the two races. Sometimes there are short marks of tattooing on the chin, and usually a column of short horizontal lines down the middle of the forehead. The men and the older boys have a narrow strip of horizontal blue lines from the hair to the bridge of the nose, while there are many individual and tribal variations on the general custom of making pictorial supplements of their faces. When the time comes that the youth or girl must be tattooed he or she is laid out on the ground, or on a reed mat, and experts, usually old women, strike the blue stuff in with a kind of coldchisel and hammer. The victim is said never to cry out, but the mother or some other kind friend generally volunteers to sit on him during the ceremony.

The tribesmen wear plenty of clothing, which they make themselves; for, unlike that portion of Formosa which the wild men leave to the weaklings of civilization, it is by no means always midsummer in the mountains. The men and the boys in most cases wear a single garment from shoulders to loins; on cold and rainy days they wrap themselves in a rough-woven blanket that seems to go entirely around them, like the proverbial barrel of the clothesless bather. Those who have taken a head wear a hawk-feather in the top of their own, which is sometimes covered with a cross between a hat and a cap but is more commonly bare, their long hair done up in various more or less fantastic forms of coiffure, according to the tribe, individual vanity, and the proximity of festival-time. The women, including those who come into the camphor-camps, dress in a loose kind of skirt and a cloak-waist open under the arms, showing the outer sides of their breasts. Like all habitual mountain-climbers, unburdened with shoes, both sexes have overgrown and widely separated great toes. Most Taiyal belles sport necklaces of what seem to be human teeth. Men and women alike have various ideas of ear-adornment, such as bamboo tubes thrust through the pierced and stretched lobes, and more or less universally deck themselves out in other wild-man forms of ornament. Some of the chiefs and their wives are very resplendent in their court regalia.

The plains to the south of the magnificent Taiyal territory are less inducive to independence of spirit, and both land and people peter out in interest, the far southerners becoming mere farmers, with many schools now among them. Some become assistant policemen and even rise to the height of assistant school-teachers, though they must teach only in the Japanese language and are considered civilized only in so far as they take on Japanese manners and point of view. There are still some small wild tribes scattered through the southern half of the island, but, in the main, pacification has ended there and development begun. The Paiwan of the extreme south, a more pleasant-looking people than most of the others, make crudely carved stone images, vaguely resembling totem-poles. They cradle their children by hanging them in baskets to vine-ropes swinging from the branch of a tree. Some of them have so far deserted their old ways as to build split-bamboo houses somewhat like those of the Japanese, and after a certain schooling are prone to mix their own garb with that of their conquerors. They make good guardsmen, but they, too, had until quite recently their “skull-shelves,” of the pigeonhole variety, and they still have their club-houses, commonly built high above the ground on bamboo scaffolding.

Over on Botel-Tobago, one of the many small islands off the coast of Formosa, there is an extremely primitive race called the Yami. But there must somewhere be an end to everything, and I beg to be excused the arduous sea-going labor of visiting the Pescadores, the Kuriles, far-flung Yap, and the Marshall Islands, so recently forced to give allegiance to the divine mikado, merely to round out this hasty journey through some of the nooks and corners of the Japanese Empire.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Page Changed from Changed to

136 vessel of the Satsuma lord. It vassal of the Satsuma lord. It
was by such outspoken was by such outspoken

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