Chapter XII: Formosa, Japan’s Tropical Island

Although it is very old, the Japanese Empire is still growing. In 1895 the Japanese had a war with China, and before they would make peace they forced the Chinese to give them the largest island belonging to that ancient country. Perhaps they thought that as their empire was entirely made up of islands they could govern this one better than the Chinese had done. The truth is that the Chinese had not governed it very well, and in many ways its people are better off under the Japanese.

I have already told you how the Japanese took the lower half of the island of Sakhalin from the Russians. That was ten years after they obtained the largest Chinese island. Later I shall explain how in 1910 they added a whole country. So you see the Japanese Empire has been growing even during our own days.

If only our legs were long enough, we could use the string of little Japanese islands the Spaniards named the Ladrones (“Robbers”) as stepping-stones from Kyushu to Formosa. But as they are not, we are more likely to find a steamer for Formosa sailing from Nagasaki than from Kagoshima. The Portuguese gave Formosa the name we know it by; it is their word for “beautiful.” The Japanese also at first called it “beautiful island,” in their language Takasagoshima; but now they call it by its Chinese name of Taiwan, or “Terraced Bay.”

A Tempest in a Teapot

Beautiful things are sometimes hard to manage, and this egg-shaped island, about as large as Massachusetts, and in one place barely a hundred miles from the coast of China, has given the Japanese plenty of trouble. In fact it has always had a troubled history. The Portuguese and the Dutch fought over it; the Dutch quarreled about it with the Chinese; a great Chinese pirate captured it; the United States ruled it once for a year; and now the Japanese are not finding it easy to control. Half in the tropics and half in the temperate zone (the Tropic of Cancer crosses the middle of it), Formosa is full of mountains, jungles, and savages. The mountains are heaped up until the topmost is reached in Mt. Morrison, which the Japanese call Niitakayama, 14,270 feet in height. This is the highest point in the Japanese Empire, almost as high as our Mt. Rainier. When an island reaches such a height as this it means that most of it is very mountainous. At first sight of it from the sea I was not surprised that at least two different races called it “Beautiful Island.”

Though Takao at the southern end of the island has a fine harbor, and there are a few other ports, almost everyone who comes to Formosa lands at Kiirun on the northern end. There is a saying that it rains in Kiirun four hundred days a year! I passed through it twice without seeing a drop of rain; still, I did not stay twenty-four hours either time, so perhaps the saying is almost true. The Japanese have made Kiirun, which the Chinese call Keelung, a very modern port, with wide paved streets and big brick buildings, landing wharves and drydocks. But what surprises the traveler still more perhaps, especially if he comes from China, so backward in such things, is to find that there are fourteen passenger trains a day to the capital, eighteen miles away.

A Modern City in an Old Country

Taipeh or Taihoku, capital of Formosa, is sometimes called the most modern city in Japan. After the Japanese took the island, they tore down the old Chinese slums and anything else they did not like, and rebuilt the city according to the latest ideas. They could not have rebuilt a city of old Japan so well, for the owners of houses and shops would have kept them from tearing down as much as they wished. Taipeh has wide, straight streets, crossing one another at right angles. They are well paved, and most of them are lined by fine trees or parks. Down in the business section the sidewalks are covered with arcades built out from the shops. In so hot a country it is very pleasant to be able to stay in the shade while shopping among the modern Japanese stores. Besides a great government building, there are museums and banks, excellent school buildings, a botanical garden, modern water supply and sewers, and many other things to prove that the people of Formosa have gained much by being taken over by the Japanese.

Taipeh, or Taihoku, capital of Formosa, is very up-to-date under the
Japanese; in fact, with its wide business streets lined by arcades,
it is called the most modern city in Japan.
]

There are no street cars in Formosa, but good Japanese railways run the whole length of the island. Several trains every day cover the 257 miles from the northern to the southern port between daybreak and dark. The trains are like those elsewhere in Japan, for all are government owned. The first and second class cars have upholstered benches along the sides, the third class have hard wooden ones arranged like the seats in our trains. The Japanese remain polite even down here in their hottest island. At the door of each car the guard or conductor takes off his hat, bows, and says he is sorry to trouble the honorable passengers to show him their tickets. Now and then a train boy comes through, but he is not the kind of train boy we have in the United States, for he has nothing to sell. Instead he keeps the cars always clean by using a broom and dustpan, sometimes a sprinkling can, and collecting rubbish left by passengers.

A Hot Meal in Wooden Boxes

In Japan the people who sell things to passengers are not on the trains but on the station platforms. Boys in green caps or bearing other signs of their business, march back and forth past the train windows, selling tea, hot milk, fruit, rice cakes, California raisins, native jams and doughy candy, cigarettes, beer, newspapers and magazines, and especially _O bento_. Among Japanese travelers the “honorable bento” takes the place of our dining cars. It is a package of two very thin wooden boxes, one containing hot rice and the other several kinds of Japanese food, such as fish, raw or cooked, omelet, beans, pickled bamboo, and many other things familiar in Japan. With this package comes a fresh pair of chopsticks, not quite broken in two, so that we know no one can ever have used them, and between them (“like the baby between mamma and papa,” the Japanese sometimes say) a toothpick! The Japanese consider a toothpick very necessary after a meal. There are paper napkins, too, and once you get used to the food of Japan and learn to use the chopsticks you will enjoy one of these station meals.

Who Likes “Aisucureemu”?

Some of the words used by the Japanese for modern things are taken from our own language. If we listen closely we may be able to understand what the boys on the platform mean by “matchee,” “tabako,” “see-dare,” “beeru,” and “aisucureemu!” On the important station platforms there are long rows of washbasins with towels. The names of all stations are written on large signboards in English as well as in Japanese. These same signboards tell the distance to the last and to the next station and mention, also in English, all the places of interest that can be seen near by. In this respect Japanese railroads are more enterprising than our own.

Formosan schoolgirls jumping the rope between classes, in the yard of
a former Confucian temple that the Japanese have made over into a
school.
]

On the way south we shall see the famous old city of Tainan, capital of the Dutch and then of the Chinese pirate leader, and a dozen or more other cities and large towns, all made very clean and modern by Japanese rule. Perhaps we shall find some Confucian temples made over into schools, and here and there an old city gate standing as a kind of monument of Chinese times, the wall having been torn down. We may even catch glimpses of Japanese and Formosan boys and girls, with their leather book sacks on their backs or over a shoulder, going to school in the same kind of uniforms the school children of old Japan wear during the hotter months.

Japanese schoolboys in Formosa, in the uniforms most Japanese pupils
wear, with the sacks in which they carry their books.
]

Japanese girls on their way home from school in Formosa. They wear
much the same uniform as the girls in Japan proper, and like the
boys they carry their books in orderly knapsacks.
]

More interesting than the towns, perhaps, are the country scenes along the way. There are fields of sugar cane as well as rice; many banana plants show their huge leaves and big purple blossoms; tropical bamboos as big as trees wave their plumes lazily in the breeze. The country women are dressed so much like the men that we can hardly tell them from their husbands. Descended from Chinese immigrants, perhaps several generations back, they have the Chinese women’s custom of wearing trousers. But there is no foot-binding among the women of Formosa; that dreadful custom the immigrants left behind. The women along the way are therefore able to work side by side with the men, carrying loads on poles across their shoulders and pushing cars of country produce on tiny railroads that run toward the mountains. Some of the women in the train, especially on the hard benches of third class, have their hair done up in a very elaborate fashion, as if trying, not very successfully, to imitate the ceremonial hair dressing of Japanese ladies or of _geisha_.

Educated Formosan youths. They had been members of the same class in
school in one of the interior towns, and had come together for a
reunion.
]

After we have passed Kagi and the signboard that marks the Tropic of Cancer, we find many of the people chewing betelnut. It is not really that, though that is the name by which we call it in Europe and America. It is really the nut of the very slender arec palm and the leaf of the betel vine that climbs it, mixed with a little lime. Betelnut chewing is common among both men and women in the oceanic part of Asia.

All day long we notice that the government railways of Formosa stay close to the seacoast and on level ground. The fact is that the Japanese have modernized only the flat fringe of the country. Here there are modern towns and railways and roads and capable police, and all the other usual evidences of civilization. But the three-fourths of the island which piles into the sky in great forest-covered mountain ranges is much as it was before the Japanese came; in fact, much as it was thousands of years ago. Among the foothills there are the Hakkas, a kind of Chinese people, who plant and cultivate, like the real Chinese of the lowlands. But among the mountains live the wild tribes that were there when Formosa was all a wilderness. It is these that make beautiful Formosa so troublesome to the Japanese. In order to find out what the problem is, suppose we leave the tame level coast lands and climb into the mountains. There is a little risk involved, as you shall see, but we know that genuine travel, like any other real accomplishment, has its toils and its dangers.