Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

I have already given it as my humble opinion that the Japanese are not particularly adaptable. This was impressed upon me once more in Takao, principal port of southern Formosa and the end of the main line of the railway. The island is small; American or European visitors are rare; the "foreign office" in the capital had insisted on showing me special attention-which of course was not entirely mere courtesy. As I descended from the train at Takao, the government official who met me turned out to be one of those charming gentlemen into which the brighter pebbles of Japanese humanity can be polished under favorable circumstances, who spoke English perfectly, and who was a Christian into the bargain, whatever difference that may make. He made the inexcusable error of mistaking me for a person of importance, and we were soon spinning away in his high-powered motor-car to the best inn of Takao. It was the absolutely unchanged Nipponese character of this hostelry which emphasized the old impression that the people of Japan do not readily adapt themselves to a new environment. From its arched entrance to the tiny back garden the principal inn of Takao might have been in the heart of Tokyo-and in the depths of midwinter. There were the same polished wooden floors between the step-shelf at the door where one exchanged one's footwear for inn slippers; the square, mat-floored room with almost as large an antechamber to which I was assigned had been as hermetically sealed as paper _shoji_ and sliding wooden outer walls could make it. The three or four quilts spread on the floor in the middle of the room would have been an excellent bed in northern Manchuria in January; on an early October night in the tropics a sheet would have been a much more welcome covering than the arctic quilt in the form of a kimono, the invariable one under which the guest of the Japanese is forced to smother himself in all climates and latitudes, or go uncovered. For toward morning there is a mild chill even in southern Formosa, which the immense mosquito-net all but filling the large room could not entirely shut out. To say that the inn was Japanese is also equivalent to mentioning that electric lights blazed throughout it during the night, glaring fiercely in upon the pseudo-sleeper even though he may have found some means of turning out the one immediately over his head.

But if every other suggestion had been lacking, the bath alone would have proved how thoroughly Japan has been transplanted to this southernmost point of the empire. The lady of the house herself conducted me to the place of public ablutions; no respectable Japanese hostess would leave to a mere servant-maid this courtesy toward a guest whom the attentions of the government proved a distinguished personage. She was as comely a young woman as an uncomely race ordinarily produces, eminently respectable, I am sure, in the Japanese sense of the word, with a plump baby of the vintage of the previous summer, and a husband who would certainly not have endured with equanimity any suggestion of unseemly conduct, from his Nipponese point of view, on the part of his wife. A shadow projected upon the glazed glass of the bath-room door showed that it was occupied. I know of ladies who might have turned back under the circumstances; my Japanese hostess slid the door wide open and courteously invited me to enter with her.