Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

Had I come directly from Japan proper to Formosa, instead of by way of several months in China, my impression of its Japaneseness might not have been so acute. But that interim in the quite different, even though neighboring, land of Confucius made the changes which its present rulers have wrought upon the long-Chinese island during the thirty years since they took possession of it stand out in striking relief. No doubt a journey in the reverse order, from Japan through Formosa to China, would have emphasized instead the likenesses between the island and the former Celestial Empire. For at least in its thickly inhabited western coastland Formosa is still as much Chinese as Japanese, and the little-accessible mountainous bulk of the country is a world apart, where neither of the great nations chiefly concerned in the history of the island has left many traces.

A cross-wave journey from Foochow through the habitually turbulent waters of the shallow Formosan channel kept our small Japanese steamer rolling like the proverbial log, all night and all day, to the very mouth of Kiirun Harbor. After the often Elysian freedom of life in China-for the foreigner enjoying the rights of extraterritoriality-the realization came almost with a shock that I was back in a mikado-ruled land again. The literal-minded little police officer, for instance, who kept me courteously but firmly imprisoned on the ship during the two hours necessary to telephone the "foreign office" in the capital and get me "special permission" to land, because some _t_ or _i_ in my passport had not been properly crossed or dotted, called attention to a grave error in my guide-book. Cameras, he carefully pointed out, are not merely "regarded with suspicion in Kiirun," as the red-faced volume had it, but they are strictly forbidden! In fact, most of his conversation during that stupid two hours was on this important point. I trust the ordinarily exact, though often human, compiler thereof will take care in future not to permit other serious mistakes of this description to sully his excellent pages. The notion that the writer might have meant the statement to be mildly facetious could not, of course, have occurred to a matter-of-fact little Nipponese mind.