IMPRESSIONS FROM A DISTANCE

As to the actual existence of matriarchates I had always been sceptical. Matrilineal tribes, and those matrilocal—that was a different matter. The existence of these among certain primitive peoples had long been substantiated. But that the name should descend in the line of the mother, or that the newly married couple should take up its residence in the tribe or phratry of the bride, has not of necessity meant that the woman held the reins of power. Quite the reverse in many cases, as actual contact with peoples among whom matrilineal and matrilocal customs existed has proved to every practical observer.[1]

Those lecturers in the “Woman’s Cause” who boasted of the “great matriarchates of old” I thought weakened, rather than strengthened, the cause they would advocate by attempting to bring to its aid evidence builded on the sands. The great “matriarchates of antiquity” I was inclined to class with the “Golden Age” of the Theosophists, as representing a state of affairs not only “too good to be true,” but one in which the wish was—to paraphrase—father to the belief. And as to prehistoric matriarchates, representing a highly evolved state of civilization—in anything like the present-day significance of that word—I am still sceptical; as sceptical as I am of a Golden Age preceding the day of Pithecanthropus and his kind.

But a land which is, as regards its aboriginal inhabitants—now confined to a few tribes, and those fast diminishing, in its more mountainous and inaccessible portions—sufficiently matripotestal to justify its being called a matriarchate, I have found. And this, as is often the case with a quest of any sort, rather by accident. Residence among the American Indians of New Mexico, of Arizona, and of Nevada, and a slight knowledge of the natives of certain of the Pacific Islands—particularly those of Hawaii and of the Philippines—had led me to give up the idea of finding a genuine matriarchate even among primitive peoples. Too often I had found that where those who had “passed by” had spoken of a “matriarchal state” as existing, investigation had proved one that was only matrilineal or matrilocal.

It was in Formosa that I found these matriarchal people; Formosa, that little-known island in the typhoon-infested South China Sea, so well called by its early Portuguese discoverers—as its name implies—“the beautiful.” Indeed, it was the beauty of Formosa that first attracted me. I shall never forget the first glimpse that I caught of the island as I passed it, going by steamer from Manila[2] to Nagasaki. There it lay, in the light of the tropical sunrise, glowing and shimmering like a great emerald, with an apparent vividness of green that I had never seen before, even in the tropics. During the greater part of the day it remained in sight, apparently floating slowly past—an emerald on a turquoise bed. For on that day there was no typhoon or threat of typhoon, and on such a day the China Sea can, with its wonderful blueness and calm, make amends for the many other days on which, like the raging dragon that the Chinese peasants believe it veritably to be, of murky green, spitting white foam, deck-high, it threatens—and often brings—death and destruction to those who venture upon it. Nor was the emerald island a jewel in the rough. The Chinese call it Taiwan, a name which means, in the characters of their language, Terrace Beach, Chinese character.[3] This name the Japanese—the present masters of the Island—have adopted; and it is not an inappropriate one. Nor do the terraces refer to those small, low-lying ones of the rice-paddies which for some centuries Chinese coolies have cultivated on the fertile east coast of the island; but rather to those bolder mountain terraces, carved by the hand of Nature, and covered with that wild verdure which only tropical rains, followed by tropical sunshine, can produce.[4] These terraces—gleaming brilliant green, and seeming to refract the sunlight of that April day, as we sailed across the Tropic of Cancer, which cuts Formosa through the middle—were curiously like the facets of a great emerald, polished and carefully cut.

The glimpse which I caught that day of the shining island with its vivid colouring, and seemingly wondrously carved surface, remained with me as a pleasant memory during the several years that I spent in Japan.

Although Formosa is now a Japanese colony—has been since 1895—one is able to get curiously little definite information in Japan regarding the island. From the Japanese themselves one hears only of the marvellous energy and skill of the Japanese in exploiting the resources of the island—sugar, camphor, tea—and the manufacture of opium, a Government monopoly. From the English, Scottish, and Canadian missionaries stationed in Formosa, who sometimes spend their summers in Japan, one hears more of the exploiting, on the part of the Japanese, of the Chinese population of Formosa—a fact which later I found to be cruelly true.

Now and then, while I was in Japan, I heard vague rumours of head-hunting aboriginal tribes in the mountains of Formosa, but regarding these I could gain little exact information. The Japanese, when questioned about the aborigines, were either curiously uncommunicative, or else launched at once into panegyrics concerning the nobility of the Japanese authorities in Formosa in allowing dirty, head-hunting savages to live, especially as some of these dirty head-hunters had dared to rebel against the Japanese Government of the island. Of the manners and customs of the aborigines, however, the Japanese seemed wholly ignorant. Nor were the missionaries from Formosa much better informed, as far as the aborigines were concerned. Their mission work, they said, was confined to the Chinese population of the island, with now and then tactful attempts at the conversion of the Japanese. But as for the aboriginal tribes—yes, they believed there were such people in the mountains; one of their number, when going from one Chinese village to another in the interior of the island, had seen a queen or “heathen priestess” of the aborigines carried on the shoulders of her followers. More they did not know—yes, probably it was true that these savages cut off people’s heads whenever they had a chance. They were heathen—what could one expect?...

While failing to get much accurate information regarding the aborigines of Formosa, I managed, on the other hand, to get a good deal of misinformation. One book in particular, I remember, written obviously by one who had never been there, gave the impression that the whole island was inhabited by savages, with a “small sprinkling at the ports of Japanese, Chinese, English, and Filipinos.”

The most trustworthy information concerning Formosa—as I later learned, after I myself had been to the island—was that obtained through the columns of the Japan Chronicle, an English newspaper published in Kobe. This information was in connection, particularly, with “reprisal-measures” of extraordinary severity taken by the Japanese Government of Formosa against certain of the aboriginal tribes, some members of which had risen in revolt against the Japanese gendarmerie (Aiyu-sen) placed in authority over them. This curiously cruel strain in the Japanese character was at that time difficult for me to believe[5] (I had not then been in Korea, or in any of the other Japanese dependencies). But what was said of the Formosan aborigines aroused my interest to such an extent that I was anxious to study them at first-hand.

Circumstances, however, prevented my going to Formosa for some time. A “foreigner”—American or European—anywhere in the Japanese Empire is always more or less under surveillance; in the colonies—Formosa and Korea—more rather than less. Any attempt to go to Formosa to carry out independent investigation of the aborigines would, I knew, have been politely thwarted by the Japanese authorities. A “personally conducted tour” could, finances permitting, have easily been arranged. I would have been most politely received by the Japanese officials of the island, and escorted by them to those places which they wished me to see, and introduced to those people whom they wished me to meet. Such had been the experience of several “foreigners” who had gone to visit the island and “study its people.” To live for any length of time in Formosa one must satisfy the Japanese authorities that definite business demands one’s presence there. At that time I had no “definite business which demanded my presence” in Formosa. Nor had a “bradyaga”[6] like myself the capital to start a business in tea or sugar, which would have given a credible excuse for living in the island. Besides, a woman tea-exporter!—the Japanese authorities would scarcely have been satisfied.

My desire to learn at first-hand something of the aborigines of Formosa remained, therefore, more or less an inchoate inclination on my part, and I turned my attention to other things. Then, curiously enough, as coincidences always seem curious when they affect ourselves, a few months later, when I was in Kyoto, studying Mahayana Buddhism,[7] came an offer from a Japanese official to go to Formosa as a teacher of English in the Japanese Government School in Taihoku, the capital of the island.[8]

I had taught English in Japan—both in Tokyo and Kagoshima[9]—and I knew that however Japanese people in different parts of the empire might vary in other respects, on one point, at least, they were singularly alike; that is, in their incapacity for the ready assimilation of a European tongue. This in rather curious contrast to their ability for imitation in other respects. No; teaching English to Japanese was no sinecure. But it opened for me the way to go to Formosa; it gave me an “excuse for being,” as far as existence on that island was concerned. Consequently I accepted the offer to teach in the school which had been built for the sons of Japanese officials in Formosa,[10] and in September 1916 I sailed from Kobe, Japan, for Keelung, the northernmost port of Formosa.