Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

Takao by day proved to be a small Gibraltar, with a dredged harbor, a modern Japanese quarter built mainly on reclaimed land on one side of the little bay, and on the other a Formosan Chinese town of the customary toned-down disorder and odors, both soon petering out among some rather barren hills. Monkeys scamper through the shrubbery on the tops of these, no doubt pausing now and then on a swaying branch to gaze down upon the works of their more developed but less care-free prototypes below; palm-trees here and there stand out against the dense tropical sky-line; flowers grow in a certain profusion in Japanese gardens and in the modified jungle beyond the outskirts. Seasons vary greatly within short distances throughout Formosa, and at Takao the rains come in July and August, even then only in torrential afternoon showers, so that for all its two and a half degrees of greater propinquity to the equator life is less dreary there than in constantly raining Kiirun.

Steamer-loads of timbers from the forests of Arisan in the heart of the island were being shipped from Takao for the rebuilding of Tokyo. Under ordinary circumstances Japan furnishes her own lumber and that of Formosa goes to China and adjacent lands. The Takao coolies handling it earn an average of a yen a day; farmers and Chinese in the surrounding country districts get forty _sen_, an improvement on the home-land of the latter, who are no doubt glad to escape trouble-ridden China at any price. It is but a short journey across the Formosan channel from Takao to Amoy-where returning Chinese, armored with Japanese citizenship picked up in Formosa, which brings with it the rights of extraterritoriality, make great trouble for the local authorities; but that is another story. So, too, is the unoccupied group of unpainted wooden buildings specially erected to house the prince regent during a recent two-day visit, which are so sacred that they cannot even be photographed. Nor, thanks to the dreadful secrecy that hangs over all fortified zones in the Japanese Empire, can the rather pretty scene below, with the well-laid-out little modern town at one's feet, the more haphazard old one across the blue harbor, from out of which through the miniature Pillars of Hercules a pathetic little knock-kneed Portuguese steamer under a Chinese captain was just at that moment hobbling, recalling that once, three or four centuries ago....