Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

The savages of Taiwan raise excellent tobacco, profoundly scorning the Japanese Government Tobacco Monopoly Bureau; they make, and both sexes smoke, bamboo-root pipes, not of the very long, one-piece type so common among the Chinese, but much like our corn-cob, the bowl upright on a small stem. Most of them chew betel-"nut. " They are fond of peanuts, covering the floors of their "club-houses" with the shells; they grow some rice and more potatoes, and have a way of preserving the tubers for long periods. Their low houses are thatched but usually built of slabs of slate, laid flat, with carved beams under the eaves and, out in front, a wide veranda, or family club-house, floored with slate or flat stones, very much like the _paepae_ of the South Seas. Their kitchen utensils are crude, including some shallow iron kettles, such as are widely used by the Chinese, and they pound their rice or millet with a wooden pestle in log-made mortars. Furniture is one of the least serious of their problems, so long as the family "skull-shelf" is kept in good condition. Children are carried papoose-fashion, and the bearing of other burdens, also almost exclusively the privilege of the women, is done on the back, with a "tump-line" or head-strap across the forehead, like our North American Indians and so many other primitives throughout the globe. In fact, it is astonishing how many customs are strikingly alike among wild people of opposite sides of the earth; at times they seem almost as unoriginal as their civilized brethren.

Even the women of the domesticated Taiyal head-hunters who hang about the camphor-camps have their faces tattooed in blue, with two broad bands in long diagonal lines, like symmetrical cat-scratches, from the corners of the mouth and nose to where they disappear in the hair near the ears. This makes them look astonishingly like the blue-mustache-wearing Ainu women at the other end of the Japanese Empire, though there is probably no relationship except savagery between the two races. Sometimes there are short marks of tattooing on the chin, and usually a column of short horizontal lines down the middle of the forehead. The men and the older boys have a narrow strip of horizontal blue lines from the hair to the bridge of the nose, while there are many individual and tribal variations on the general custom of making pictorial supplements of their faces. When the time comes that the youth or girl must be tattooed he or she is laid out on the ground, or on a reed mat, and experts, usually old women, strike the blue stuff in with a kind of coldchisel and hammer. The victim is said never to cry out, but the mother or some other kind friend generally volunteers to sit on him during the ceremony.