Word: formosae
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...Japanese also turned Formosa's fragrant Oolong tea into a big-money crop, but here their customary sense of order and cleanliness deserted them. Of the girls employed in the tea-sorting godowns a Yankee traveler in 1922 complained: "Some of these tea-sorters are as much addicted to maternity as the cigarette-makers of Seville, and not a few carry young bead-eyed Mongolians slung in wide black bands over one hip. These pigtailed little toddlers do not always heighten one's relish for the finished tea, as the big piles of leaves ready for sorting...
Crows & Bombing Planes. In 1895, after its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, China was forced to cede Formosa to Japan. Admiral Viscount Kabayama, appointed Japan's first governor general, sailed down to Formosa in triumph, released from his flagship as a sign of victory a pair of crows. Their descendants still make Formosan daybreaks raucous...
...Formosan Chinese proclaimed a "Republic of Formosa" which the Japanese defeated in three weeks. The aborigines were harder to handle. To isolate the aborigines up in the mountains, the Japanese built what they called the Savage Guard Line, 360 miles of barbed wire fence, 230 miles of which were electrified in the 1920s. Along the Guard Line the Japanese maintained a force of 5,000 men who, as late as 1930, were besieging the aborigines with field guns, land mines and bombing planes...
Japanese rule in Formosa was a model of colonial exploitation. They developed an irrigation system so that water falling during the rainy season could be stored for use in dry periods, extended it to cover two-thirds of Formosa's arable land. Under Japanese guidance, Formosa's annual rice crop was doubled, and cultivation of sugar cane increased so greatly that in the years before World War II the Japanese Empire stood fourth among the world's sugar-producing nations...
Ports & Power. The Japanese were ready to spend money in order to make money. They gave Taipei, Formosa's capital, a government building which would do credit to most British colonies, developed deepwater ports at Keelung and Kaohsiung. Throughout the island Japanese engineers built 2,463 miles of railway, 11,300 miles of good road. They harnessed Formosa's short, swift-flowing rivers, built a large 300,000-kilowatt hydroelectric power station at Jihyuehu (Sun-Moon Lake). For other power sources, they worked Formosa's coal deposits, believed to total 400 million metric tons, and exploited...