Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

There are distinct evidences of blood-relationship between the savages of Taiwan and the inhabitants of the southern islands of Japan proper. Japanese who have lived long in Formosa confess that they cannot tell a head-hunter from one of their own people merely by his features. To Westerners the mountaineers look almost exactly Japanese, except that the eyes seem a bit more liquid, a trifle wider open, with that wild something in them of untamed animals which distinguishes the genuine savage the world over. Not merely do their features suggest the same origin as their would-be rulers; they are of about the same size and build, perhaps a bit larger, thanks to their more open-air life. It is coming to be believed by many that they and the Japanese are both Malay tribes which history has driven in different directions. Possibly they are the same people, who fought their way up from the south, this branch getting side-tracked and lost among the mountain fastnesses of Formosa and going, or remaining, wild, while the head-hunting propensities of the other branch turned to more modern methods. It is a captivating thought, and would make the "Jap man's burden" all the more justified-merely the task of reclaiming his own lost brethren.

Certainly I had to look twice to recognize that the boys in a frontier school at one of the advance stations in Taiyal-land, dressed as they were in uniform kimonos of black and white plaid, were not what they seemed at first sight, but the sons of men who were recently, and in some cases probably still are, hunting the heads of their neighbors. In fact, there was one man among the two score boys who had the right to wear the hawk-feather of the successful hunter, a sturdy fellow of thirty, still with that peculiar wild-animal look in his eyes, who was in the same primary class as his son of six. It struck me that it would be a more thankful job to try to teach the son, an impression in which the Japanese teacher, in his pedagogue-gendarme uniform, bore me out.