Chapter XIII: Japan’s Wild Men

No one knows surely the origin of the wild tribes living in the forest-covered mountains of Formosa. Scientists think they are of the Malay race and came centuries ago from other islands farther south. Perhaps they are related to the wilder tribes of the Philippine Islands. Some people, indeed, believe that the Formosan tribes were originally of the same race as the Japanese, but that they got lost in the mountains and remained savages while the others, led by the ancestors of the Mikado, went on to less mountainous islands and became the civilized Japanese of to-day. It is true that if you dress one of the wild men of Formosa in Japanese clothes even a Japanese can hardly tell him from one of his own people.

Because of this possible race connection the Japanese should have a double desire to civilize the Formosan natives. The principal reason, however, for looking after them is to prevent their interfering with something very important to Japan. There are all kinds of tropical trees in the great crumpled-up part of Formosa, but one of them is more important than all the others—the camphor tree. You may know that moth balls contain camphor, but did you know that six million pounds of camphor are used every year in making celluloid, two million in perfumery, a million in drugs, and several million in other ways? When you discover that the world uses twelve million pounds of camphor every year for these various purposes, and then find that Formosa produces nine of those twelve million pounds, you will see why the Japanese were forced to tame the savages.

The camphor trees grow only in the mountains. There are a few single trees down on the narrow flat edge of the island, just as there are a few huge ones about the temples of China. But in order to get even thousands of pounds of camphor, to say nothing of nine million pounds every year, the Japanese had to send their camphor gatherers high up into the mountains. There the wild men used to attack them; even now they sometimes descend upon a camphor camp and kill the workmen or destroy the simple machinery.

A Campaign Against Head Hunters

For this reason the Japanese were forced to start a regular campaign against the wild tribes. The worst of them are head-hunters, like some of the people living in the wilder parts of the Philippines. The various tribes have had wars among themselves for centuries, and when they kill a man they carry home as a souvenir to prove their bravery, not his scalp, but his whole head! At home the savage lays his enemy’s skull away in his “skull shelf.” This is made of flat pieces of stone and has many pigeon-holes, somewhat like the boxes at the post office. In former times at least, the man who had the most skulls was considered the bravest, and became chief of the tribe. The Japanese have sent soldiers into the mountains to destroy the skull shelves, but some of them still remain.

It is only the men and boys who hunt heads, but the women and girls are partly to blame. No girl will marry a youth until he has gone out and killed at least one man and brought home his head. So the young Formosan who falls in love must hide in the woods along the “guard line” of the Japanese, and stay there until he can shoot a tame Formosan or a Japanese or some savage of another tribe than his own. Then he can march home in triumph, knowing he will no longer be treated as a child by his tribe or (particularly) by the lady of his choice.

Fencing in the Wild Men

The guard line is a wide cleared strip through the forest, with sentry posts and provision houses at intervals, and in some places with barbed wire fences that can be charged with a deadly electric current. When the Japanese first tried this scheme of fencing in the wild men among their high mountains, several head-hunters were killed by the electrified wires. But savages are not fools—they can learn by experience even if they do not go to school—and those of Formosa soon found that it was dangerous to touch the wire fences. They have for many generations built very clever bamboo bridges across the torrents and chasms of their mountains, so now they build a stile over the electrified fence, or dig a tunnel under it, and still occasionally take a head on the other side. No one knows how many they take inside their inclosure.

The head-hunting savages of Formosa build their houses of flat slabs
of stone.
]

When I was in Formosa, not long ago, the government records showed that thirteen heads had been taken during that year, not counting those the head-hunters took from one another. Two of the victims were Japanese. The others were savages who had submitted to the new rulers and were allowed to live outside the guard line, or descendants of Chinese immigrants who lived among the foothills or down on the flat edges of the island. No one has ever heard of the Formosan savages taking the head of a white man. Whether this is because they do not consider the white race enemies or merely because a white man has never come near enough to risk his head, we are not sure. So far no American or European has volunteered to go inside the guard line to find out.

As a matter of fact, the Japanese would not allow the traveler to risk his life among the savages, even if he wished. There are so few white people in Formosa that it is easy for the government to keep track of them all, and before the traveler can even visit a camphor camp he must get permission from the foreign office in Taipeh. It is hard to believe that the wild tribes are so close to the capital of the island that if they had field glasses they could almost make out the despised tame people down in the streets. The places where one is allowed to go into the mountains are all farther south. Up Arisan, a mountain peak almost as high as Mt. Morrison, runs a cog-wheel railroad that brings down valuable timbers from the interior. But as the savages are now almost tamed in that region, I obtained permission to go instead to a camphor camp farther north.

My Trip to a Camphor Camp

Early in the morning a servant came to me in the Japanese inn room where I had spent the night and said that my “train” was waiting at the door. I found it to be a little wooden platform about five feet square, mounted on wheels made to run on a track. A kind of chair was fastened on it. This is what the Japanese call “first class” travel on the little narrow-gauge railways that run up into the foothills. The main purpose of these railways is to take supplies to the camphor camps and bring down the camphor products. The same car without a chair is called “third class” and is used by the natives, who pay much less than a white man.

My “engine” was a stout coolie, one of the tame immigrant Chinese people of the coast, who ran behind and pushed the car, now and then jumping on and riding a little when there was a down grade. For two hours he trotted across an almost flat plain, nearly all planted with rice. Then came a village that must have been a division point, for there I changed “locomotives.” Farther on, where it became more and more hilly, I had two “engines,” just as our trains do in going through the Rocky Mountains. Sometimes a man and his wife, dressed so much alike that it was hard to tell them apart, pushed at the same car. Now and then we met other push-cars, nearly all loaded with freight. They were shooting down the mountain side with a man clinging to a kind of baseball bat used as a brake. As it was a single-track railway, we were in danger of being hit before a descending car could stop. Because I was a first-class passenger, the cars we met all had to be lifted off the track to let me pass, unless they were so heavily loaded that it was impossible, or were coming down the mountain side so fast that we had to snatch our car off to avoid a wreck.

It made me think of the difference between the inhabitants to see the lower hillsides covered with tea bushes in such exact rows as to look as if the landscape had been tombed with a gigantic comb; while the mountain tops reminded me of the savages’ uncombed mats of hair. But the tea plantations from which the famous Formosa tea comes are not so exciting as the camphor camps higher up, both because tea is grown in many more parts of the world than camphor is, and because it is only at the camphor camps that there is any danger.

A tea plantation in the Formosan foothills. The tea bushes are planted
in long even rows, up among the hills that are too steep and high
for rice, yet not high enough for head-hunters.
]

It was after noon when I reached the camphor camp, a large village of several hundred people. Most of them had once been savages, but having surrendered to the Japanese they were allowed to live outside the electrified guard line. As fast as a new village promises to give up its head-hunting and behave, the guard line is moved beyond it, so that the savage territory is gradually becoming smaller.

Civilizing the Savages

A Japanese teacher and his class of mountain savages. The fathers of
the children were all once head-hunters, and some still are. The
teacher wears a sword because he is an officer of the Mikado. The
man on the teacher’s right was in the same class, the first grade,
as his own small son who stands in front of him.
]

In this camp there was a kind of boarding school for savages. Of the forty or fifty children of wild men who attended it, nearly all lived in a row of wooden huts on the edge of the school field. The chief Japanese teacher wore a white military uniform and carried a sword, and evidently he was very busy, for he had not shaved in a week. The boys and girls were dressed in Japanese school costumes—dark skirts over gay kimonos; but not all the pupils were boys and girls, though this was a primary school. Some of the men and women savages who could no more read and write than their children could, had come to school also. In a single class there were boys of ten and men of twenty; and in what we would call the first grade a man and his little six-year-old son were both learning their Japanese letters out of the same book.

A Japanese official who kindly asked me to stay with him while I remained in the village went out with me later to see some of the wild men. Most of the afternoon the rain poured in torrents. The paths to the savages’ houses were narrow trails up steep mountains, and downpours of rain covered them with mud as slippery as ice. Besides, Formosa is far enough south to be very warm during the day, even if the nights are cold high up in the mountains. So this was not an easy trip. At last we came, soaking wet and smeared with mud, to some one-room huts built entirely of flat stones, with a crude slate roof on top. Some of the tamer savages, who worked for the Japanese in the camphor stills, were quite friendly. They even joked with us, and offered us the long pipes with tiny bowls that both the men and the women smoked. These particular savages had completely surrendered, sending their children to the Japanese schools and themselves working at gathering camphor. Some become so tame that they go down to the cities, even to Taipeh the capital, and become rickshaw-pullers.

Not far beyond we found some untamed men. But they did not dare do us any harm, because they were allowed on the Japanese side of the guard line only on the understanding that if they started any trouble the Japanese and Formosan soldiers would treat them like wild animals. The Japanese like to have a few of the wild men at a time visit their camphor camps, and even the cities down on the plains if they can be coaxed that far from home. For they hope in that way to get word to the people of the mountains that they will have an easier life if they submit to the new rulers. But there is something in the black eyes of those visitors which makes one feel that they would like to take a few heads back home with them.

Real wild men of the head-hunting tribes of the Formosan highlands.
They looked as if they would not mind taking a head or two home with
them, but before being allowed outside the electric-wired guard line
put up by the Japanese, they had promised to behave in a civilized
manner.
]

How Camphor Is Obtained

A brick-kiln in Formosa. The bricks made here are much the same as in
southern China, no doubt because the Formosan lowlanders are almost
all descended from Chinese immigrants. The bricks are larger than
ours, dull gray in color, and rather soft.
]

Nothing would have been more interesting than to have gone on up into the mountains, if the Japanese had allowed it. As they would not, nothing was left but to see how camphor is gathered. Camphor trees have become very large during the centuries when only the savages lived among them. Now they are chopped down, to be cut up into little chips with a small scoop-shaped ax. These chips are put in bags and carried down to the push-car railway, from which part are transferred to a steam railway and taken to the capital. Sometimes the camphor is distilled in the field, that is, in towns like this one I was visiting. I saw stills roughly made of mud and bricks and looking like Chinese brick-kilns. In these the chips are boiled, and the liquid that comes from them is run through bamboo pipes to be cooled. This colorless camphor oil is put in tins or cans like those in which American gasoline and kerosene come to Asia, and is shipped down to Taipeh.

Camphor is a government monopoly in Formosa. Therefore no one can sell either camphor chips or camphor oil to anyone except to the government officials in the capital. The Japanese Government puts whatever price it sees fit on the nine million pounds of camphor furnished to the world every year. So you see it has been worth while for the Japanese to take over the island which the Chinese ruled so badly. Whatever else the visitor to Formosa may see or miss, he should not fail to go through the warehouses of the Monopoly Bureau in Taihoku, containing tons of snow-white camphor in great bins. While he wonders how men can shovel the stuff back and forth all day in air that seems filled with the pungent odor of millions of moth balls, he will realize why Formosa is so important a part of the Japanese Empire.