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Summary
Travel is an act for human beings to visit new places and experience different cultures and histories. Through travel, people can actually feel historical events and people’s lives by visiting historical places and cultural heritage sites, and can gain a deeper understanding of history and broaden their own perspectives. In this section, we will discuss the historical background of the trip and the places visited based on Ryotaro Shiba’s “Kaido yuku” (On the Road) about this journey and history.
On the Road to Taiwan” Vol. 40: Travels in Taiwan
In the last article, we discussed Hungary, a country that did not make it to the streets. This time, I would like to describe my trip to Taiwan. Taiwan, once a “nation without a nation,” was ruled by “outsiders” from Spain, Holland, Japan, and the mainland. After the “Miracle,” Taiwan is now in the process of transforming itself into a “mainlander” country.
This time, we will meet President Lee Teng-hui from Taipei, who will be invited to the official residence along with writer Chen Sun-sin. While walking through the streets of Taipei, we will think about the Japanese people who were involved with this region, visit Silicon Valley in Hsinchu, the scenic Sun Moon Lake in Shanzhong, and see the bronze statue of Hatta Hsin-ichi, who led the dam construction, and his wife’s tombstone at the “Chishantou Water Depot” on the Chianan Plains. From Kaohsiung to Tainan. Afterwards, we will visit the Chikan Tower and Zeelanja Castle built by the Dutch during the Age of Discovery, and while eating tanzai noodles, we will think about the life of Zheng Cheng, famous for the Kabuki play “The Battle of Guozheng Yaoye.
The tour will continue from Kaohsiung to Sinying to see the Tropic of Cancer marker and the anniversary of the Tropic of Cancer Incident in the southern suburb of Chiayi City, and then from Kaohsiung to Taitung. After seeing the Tropic of Cancer marker and the anniversary of the Tropic of Cancer Incident of February 28th in the southern suburbs of Chiayi City, visitors will travel from Kaohsiung to Taitung. In Taitung and Hualien in the east, we will see the life of the “Takasago Tribe” and the remnants of towns from the Japanese colonial era. The journey continued to Keelung and Taipei.
Taiwan will be an island slightly smaller than Japan’s Kyushu Island, located across the sea from Japan to the northeast, the Philippines to the south, and the People’s Republic of China to the northwest.
Taiwan has become a multi-ethnic area due to immigration over the years, and is currently home to various ethnic groups such as the Minnan, Hakka, and Gaizhou people of Han Chinese descent, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish people, in addition to the Taiwanese aborigines who originally lived in Taiwan.
The de facto capital of the Republic of China is Taipei City, which together with five other directly controlled cities, including New Taipei City, Taoyuan City, Taichung City, Tainan City, and Kaohsiung City, are known as the “Six Cities” and constitute the metropolitan area of Taiwan. Taiwan’s economy is at the forefront of the world in the fields of high-tech, IT industry, and electronics, with semiconductors, wafers, video cards, CPUs, notebook computers, smartphones, and artificial intelligence as its main products. Taiwanese products account for a large share of the world market, and the country absorbs huge amounts of money from the rest of the world every year, while holding the fourth largest foreign exchange reserves in the world, after China, Japan, and Switzerland.
The official language is a kind of Chinese language called “Republic of China National Language,” which differs from the “Mandarin” Chinese of mainland China (People’s Republic of China), but the language is basically understood. The biggest difference between Mandarin and R.O.C., however, is in the “Chinese characters,” which are simplified in China, while traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan. Traditional Chinese characters correspond to the “old characters” in Japanese, but the character styles and usage are different.
Taiwan did not attract much attention until the arrival of European ships in the 16th century, and before that, Taiwan was not recorded until the Yuan dynasty, and even then, only some cities along the coast were used as ports of call for ships or as bases for Japanese pirates.
The first Europeans to visit Taiwan were the Portuguese who entered the Age of Exploration, as described in “The Road of the Southern Barbarians (2): Spain and Portugal,” and were so impressed by the beauty of Taiwan that they called it “Ilha Formosa (Ilha Formosa = Beautiful Island),” a term used mainly in Western countries. The word “Ilha Formosa” (Ilha Formosa = Beautiful Island), which was uttered by a Portuguese man who was impressed by the beauty of Taiwan at that time, became another name for the island, Formosa, used mainly in Western countries.
Later, the Spaniards entered northern Taiwan as described in “Nanban no Michi (1): Xavier and the Basques“. The first to declare possession of Taiwan was the Dutch, who built a fortress in southern Taiwan, as described in “Kaido yuku Holland Kikou (Road to the Netherlands).
Some believe that the name “Taiwan” was derived from the fact that the aborigines of Taiwan called the Dutch “Tayouan” (meaning “visitors” in the local language).
Later, in 1644, during the early years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Ming Dynasty, which had been established after the Yuan Dynasty, was conquered by the Qing Dynasty, which had been created by the Manchu people of Manchuria.
Zheng Cheng Kung Success (鄭成功, Cheng Cheng Kung) was born in Hirado, Japan, as described in “On the Road to Karatsu, Hirado, Sasebo, and Nagasaki” to a Ming Dynasty father, Zheng Shilong, and a Japanese mother, Tagawa Matsu, who also had a Japanese name, Tagawa Fukumatsu.
Zheng Cheng Sung is portrayed as a national hero in China and Taiwan, where he is also called Kokusen-ya (国姓爺). In Japan, “Kokusai-ja Kassen” was written by Monzaemon Chikamatsu using Zheng Cheng Cheng as a model, and he became a famous figure performed in joruri and kabuki plays.
After Zheng Cheng Sung died of illness in 1662, his sons launched an “anti-Qing and rehabilitation of Ming” campaign, but the Qing dynasty attacked them and they surrendered in 1683. During the war against the Qing, Zheng Cheng often requested military support from the Edo shogunate, but this was never granted because the shogunate considered it difficult for Zheng Cheng to win the war under the circumstances of the time.
The Qing attacked and conquered Taiwan in order to destroy the Zheng regime and were initially reluctant to take possession of Taiwan. However, through consultations within the imperial court, the Qing eventually decided to take possession from a military standpoint, establishing one prefecture (Taiwan) and three counties (Tainan, Kaohsiung, and Chiayi) in Taiwan, which were then incorporated under the administration of Fujian Province.
However, the Qing did not attach much importance to Taiwan as a “land outside of China” (meaning “not a territory ruled by the emperor” or “not belonging to Chinese civilization”) and remained reluctant to govern the island for a long time, especially neglecting the aborigines of Taiwan as “people outside of China” (meaning “not a people ruled by the emperor” or “not belonging to Chinese civilization”). Taiwan’s aborigines, in particular, have been neglected as “foreigner” (meaning “not ruled by the emperor” or “not part of Chinese civilization”).
However, Taiwan’s immigration to the weakly governed Ch’ing Empire was often accompanied by temperamental pirates and destitute people who had lost their livelihood, as well as malaria, dengue fever, and other tropical diseases, conflicts with the aborigines, and typhoons and other floods, which led to civil war in Taiwan. The Great Qing Empire was the first to establish a military presence in Taiwan.
In addition, there were few Han Chinese women in Taiwan because the Great Qing Empire prohibited women from traveling to Taiwan in order to restrain their own people from settling there. This led to a rapid mixing of Han Chinese with the aborigines living on the plains, forming the Han Chinese subgroup now known as the “Taiwanese.
Later, in 1895, after the Qing lost the Sino-Japanese War, Taiwan, along with the Liaodong Peninsula and the Penghu Islands, was ceded from the Qing Empire to the Japanese Empire (the Liaodong Peninsula was returned to the Qing due to the Tripartite Pact of Russia, France and Germany). (The Liaodong Peninsula was returned to the Qing Empire after the intervention of Russia, France, and Germany.) After this, Taiwan was placed under the control of the Governor-General of Taiwan as an outlying territory of Japan.
The Japanese government adopted a policy of promoting agriculture in Taiwan with the aim of dividing the island between Taiwan for agriculture and Japan for industry, and succeeded in dramatically improving the sugar industry and the production of Yomogi rice through various industrial protection policies, the development of transportation networks including railroads, and large-scale water utilization projects. In addition, the monopoly system was adopted to prevent excessive competition within Taiwan and to make Taiwan’s finances more independent.
In addition, in annexing Taiwan, Taiwanese were given the choice of selling their land and leaving the country or staying in Taiwan and becoming Japanese citizens. In addition, the sanitary conditions in Taiwan at that time were very poor, and many kinds of epidemics were spreading. It was said that drinking Taiwanese water for five days in a row would kill you.
In Kaido yuku, Hatta Yoichi built the Wushantou Dam and irrigation canal (Chianan Dashen), and a bronze statue of Hatta was erected by local residents at the Wushantou Dam lakeside to commemorate his achievements.
The Pacific War followed, and after the surrender of Japan in 1945, the ROC Nationalist Government troops led by 蔣介石 landed on Taiwan from a U.S. military ship on October 17, 1945, with about 12,000 people and more than 200 government officials to disarm the Japanese forces that had surrendered to the Allied Forces.
Since the arrival of ROC troops in Taiwan, there were frequent incidents of assaults on women and robberies, and the public offices and government forces were so corrupt that the mainlanders (Taiwanese) who had been in Taiwan until then rebelled against the public offices and government forces, leading to the February 28, 1947 uprising by the people of the mainlanders and the Ni-Ni-Yi incident. After the February 28 Incident, the government thoroughly suppressed the Taiwanese people in order to deprive them of their sense of resistance, and in 1949, 蔣介石 moved the soldiers who had been defeated in the Sino-Chinese Civil War and the government, which was in a state of collapse, to Taiwan. There, the ROC soldiers from the mainland robbed and corrupted the government officials to such an extent that soon after the military occupation, the people of the mainland began to be disappointed with their new rulers and lamented that “the dogs have gone and the pigs have come. As such, large-scale development was essential to feed the hundreds of thousands of military personnel who had fled to Taiwan from the mainland, and the huge amount of money brought in from the mainland was used for development, and Taiwan’s economy developed from light industry to heavy industry.
Meanwhile, the Communist Party, which had completely seized control of the mainland and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC), launched an attack on Kinmen Island with the goal of capturing Taiwan, but the People’s Liberation Army, which was inferior in naval and air power, was unable to gain control of the sea and air, and was unable to defeat the ROC forces holed up in fortifications or the US Seventh Fleet sailing through the Taiwan Strait. The invasion was abandoned.
In order to counter the communist forces, the U.S. determined to defend Taiwan and gave various aids to 蔣介石-美援 (美国援助 = U.S. aid). When the Vietnam War broke out, the U.S. procured military supplies from Taiwan, and in return, a large amount of foreign currency, the dollar, flowed into the Taiwanese economy, which led the Taiwanese economy to enter a period of rapid growth. In the modern era, Taiwan’s per capita GDP is $44,821, exceeding that of Japan.
After the death of 蔣經国 (President from 1978 to 1988), who had lifted martial law in 1987, Lee Teng-hui, who became president and KMT president, pushed for the democratization of Taiwan and was elected president in 1996, the first time Taiwan held a civil election for president.
Lee Teng-hui, a Taiwanese-born member of the Japanese generation who studied at Kyoto University, also had a friendship with Ryotaro Shiba, and a meeting between him and Lee Teng-hui is described in Kaido yukui.
Incidentally, Lee Teng-hui also passed away in 2020.
On the road trip, Taiwan’s Silicon Valley, Hsinchu (新竹).
Sun Moon Sawara is a scenic spot.
After visiting the Bird’s Head Water Depot and seeing the bronze statue of Hatta Hsin-ichi, who guided the construction of the dam, and his wife’s tombstone, head for Tainan and visit the Chikan Tower and Zeelanjia Castle built by the Dutch. The Chikkan Tower and Zeelanjia Castle, built by the Dutch, are also on my itinerary.
Tainan, Taiwan
He also traveled from Kaohsiung to Sinying and visited Chiayi City.
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