Notes from Central Taiwan: What the Japanese learned from indigenous farmers

Even as colonial officials condemned swidden cultivation and displaced mountain communities, they borrowed one of its most sophisticated tools: the Formosan alder and the ecological knowledge behind it

• By Michael Turton / Contributing Reporter

Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years. It is then planted with a fast-growing tree, such as Formosan Alder, which permits recovery of the plot in 10-15 years.

In the early phases of the Japanese opening of Taiwan’s mountain regions in the nineteenth century, Japanese thinkers were largely dismissive of the lifeways of Taiwan’s indigenous people, considering them inefficient and uneconomic. Many Japanese observers considered swidden cultivation profligate and wasteful. The use of Formosan Alder trees was one exception to that colonialist perception.

“Japanese scientists evinced some interest in these systems of what might now be called Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK),” writes historian John Hayashi on Japanese colonial conservation policies, “and native use of the Taiwanese alder (alnus Formosana) in particular left a lasting mark on Japanese forestry and landscapes alike.”

The Formosan Alder has a number of useful properties. It is widely distributed at altitudes between 400 and 3,000 meters. It has a strong root system, which holds the soil, reducing floods and landslides. Finally, it fixes nitrogen via a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in its root nodules, which can survive in the soil to fix nitrogen for a while after the tree itself has been removed. Scientists today regard it as a pioneer species, able to rehabilitate degraded land. Alders love light and prefer to grow on sun-facing slopes of ravines, streambeds and roads.

Researchers say its leaf litter has been well documented as possessing desirable decomposition characteristics.

Taiwan’s indigenous peoples understood all these things.

FORESTRY AND COLONIALISM

The acquisition of Taiwan and its rich forests took place against the backdrop of forestry debates and experiences in Japan and especially in Hokkaido. As David Fedman describes in Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea, Hokkaido was where Japan’s infant forestry field “first confronted some of the more vexing puzzles of settler colonialism and industrial capitalism. How might foresters work in concert with corporations to develop forestry?”

According to Fedman, Taiwan gave Japanese forestry experts a chance to show how they could generate revenue and “modernize nature.” However, he says, they “were determined to do so without the involvement of capitalists, whom they considered a corrupting influence.”

As Hayashi documents, Japanese researchers quickly identified alder as a key species for their forestry programs. Its wood was versatile and alders were well able to colonize and restore marginal areas, noted forester Kada Naoji. He also indexed the Bunun people of the mountains, who traditionally used alder for afforestation, to halt erosion and drive soil recovery. Hayashi writes that Kada made an epic journey overland from Puli Township (埔里) in what is today’s Nantou County to Sincheng Township (新城) in Hualien, a 26 day odyssey in which he made close observations of alders.

Kada traveled with the troops then fighting the Truku war (Japanese soldiers often clear-cut forests to gain access to the interior). He noted that the Truku used the same forestry techniques as the Bunun. Hayashi says that Kada’s writings made alders famous among Japanese colonial scientists, who planted them elsewhere in the empire, including Okinawa, where they are an invasive species today.

The Japanese viewed Taiwan’s indigenous people as having some dim understanding of forest management, and sought ways to integrate them into the forest-industrial complex planners were beginning to envision.

“What was useful about indigenous planting of trees, including alders, Trema orientalis, bamboo and fruit trees, was that it gave indigenes a set of skills that could be easily transferred to regularized, profit-driven and Japanese-managed silviculture,” Hayashi writes.

“Conservation” was intended to create forests that would produce economic benefits. Thus, not only forestry but entomology followed the roads and railroads into the interior. Researcher Kerstin Pannhorst has described how the construction of pushcart railroads created demand for knowledge about the insects that attacked Japanese infrastructure.

FORCED RELOCATION

After 1919, it was decided to move the indigenous people off the land, a huge, brutal program of forced relocation that ended up resettling roughly half of Taiwan’s indigenous people by 1942, Hayashi writes. The goal was to turn indigenous people into rice cultivators, a lifestyle they knew about but rejected because they understood its connection to diseases (malaria especially). Many photographs of these Japanese-era relocation villages exist, looking remarkably like the modern refugee communities the government created in the wake of the 921 earthquake and Typhoon Morakot in 2009.

That similarly emphasizes the continuity of policy across the Manchu (Qing) Empire, the Japanese empire and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) colonial state: the indigenous people must be removed so the state and its allied commercial interests can access the resources of the mountains.

The Japanese eventually moved on from alder, introducing numerous tree species, some for very specific purposes. Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) replaced the cypress forest (Chamaecyparis forest type) that now dominates at altitudes between 1,000 and 2,000 meters. At low altitudes trees introduced by Japanese foresters are the most numerous.

The “natural” Taiwan that we encounter in the great outdoors today is in many respects an artifact of Japanese foresters. Similarly, in indigenous Taiwan, as anthropologist Scott Simon documented two decades ago, “memories of the Japanese period continue to influence the ways in which people define communities, in terms of culture, place and nascent nationhood,” meaning that modern indigenous Formosa is a “co-creation” of the Japanese state and the indigenous people of Taiwan.

The indigenous people today still retain their forestry skills. Slash and burn agriculture is gone because the old growth forests are gone, but ecotourism and organic food production have been brought in. The Atayal people still plant alder and cedar to fight erosion, according to a study of indigenous resource management practiced by Makauy Business Group, which helps indigenous businesses.

“These trees shelter crops, consolidate slopes, retain water and soil and fertilize soil by defoliation,” describes the study. Trees on farmland are not removed, a local farmer explains. Instead, they cut the limbs to let the sunlight reach their crops. The farmers also know that stones in the field are useful, helping the soil drain better. When the sun shines on the stones, it heats them, promoting the growth of young crops.

And if you walk around their farms, you can still see the alder trees giving shade and life to the plants and soil.

Notes from Central Taiwan is a column written by long-term resident Michael Turton, who provides incisive commentary informed by three decades of living in and writing about his adoptive country. The views expressed here are his own.