Taiwan is the land that has been ruled by one colonizer after another. The peoples of different bloods and persuasions have loved, murdered, hated, and destroyed one another, and through it all have either come to terms with their differences or deepened their misgivings.
The complexity of our history certainly closes Taiwan off to outsiders, but even the Taiwanese ourselves find it hard to fathom.
Hainsaran is a mountain in central Taiwan, better known as Mt. Sancha. It rises 3,500 meters (11,483 ft) above sea level south of Taiwan’s tallest peak, Mt. Jade. “Hainsaran” is its name given by Taiwan’s indigenous Bunun people.
Cover of the book《The Sun Falls On Hainsaran》. Image sourced from eslit.com.
The novel As The Sun Falls On Hainsaran is inspired by a Bunun legend: the world had two suns, but one of them must be shot down. Its world, however, is set in Japanese-ruled Taiwan, and describes how low-level Japanese officials, indigenous people, and Han subjects fought or conspired with each other for their conflicting self-interests. Yet, right after Japan’s surrender, they formed a team to rescue a group of Japanese POWs whose B-24 transport crashed on Hainsaran, only for all 26 of the rescuers to perish in a typhoon.
Many questions remain; for instance, the Taiwanese people were under no obligation to follow the orders of the Japanese, but why did Minnan, Hakka, Bunun, Puyuma and other plains indigenous peoples work with the Japanese to find the POWs? What were each of their motivations? The novel depicts but a small moment, yet it is an allegory for Taiwan’s messy and intertwined history as a whole.
The author Chu Ho-chih aspires to be a novelist who tells historical stories. He has done significant field work for his works, and As The Sun Falls On Hainsaran is no different.
The indigenous peoples, Han people, and Japanese colonizers came to Taiwan at different times, and the later arrivals have always oppressed the earlier peoples. Each group came with vastly different worldviews and ways of thinking, and the later rulers have always wanted to “correct” those who came before.
For example, the Japanese colonial rulers saw the Taiwanese as “superstitious,” or “unscientific,” “unhygienic,” and sought to “rectify” that by bringing “modernity” to Taiwan. In the novel, the Japanese colonial government forcefully relocated the Bunun people living in Haiduan, a village on the southeastern coast, to Wulu in the mountains. Among those people was Haishuoer, a young man who inherited his grandfather’s name, wisdom, and courage. Since he was a kid, he was told by his grandfather: “when I die, you must bury me in the way of our ancestors, inside our home. You must not bury me in the cemetery like the Japanese say. Only those who died an unseemly death are tossed out in the wild. Only when I am at rest at home will I return to the place of our ancestors. This is the most important thing in my life.”
The tribal tradition believes that people who die in the wilderness will become evil spirits, and if those people were brought back to the tribe, the tribe will be cursed. The Japanese rulers, on the other hand, insist that the deceased cannot be left out in the wild but must be brought back to be interred in the cemetery, for public health reasons but also a belief that everyone should have a proper burial. This is how wide the gulf is between the two sides.
Two-thirds of Taiwan is covered in forests, the soil is young, and the island is made up of sharp cliff sides. Developing Taiwan is a massive challenge. Nevertheless the Japanese saw Taiwan as a launching pad for further southward imperial expansion, and invested heavily into collecting demographic, personal and natural data. The Japanese also went deeper into eastern Taiwan past where the old Qing rulers had gone, building roads and other infrastructure to better manage and exploit the area. Many of the workers were Han and indigenous Taiwanese, but many low level Japanese officials were also involved. Many lives perished in service of these projects.
Kido Yasohachi, a Japanese engineer soldier, left his oldest son Yukio in his hometown Kumamoto with his grandparents, and sought out a better living working in Taiwan. He brought his reluctant wife together to Taiwan to “tame the savages”’ —managing the indigenous subjects. He took on the job of extending the Guanshan (Kuan-soann) roads into mountainous central Taiwan, including building a suspension bridge across a deep canyon. The bridge has a crucial political symbolic meaning: the faster the bridge is built, the faster the Japanese colonial government can claim to “pacify the last of the savages” and “control the most remote land in Taiwan.”
Kido and his team of Japanese workers used dynamite to clear their way, and hung across just one single metal wire precariously over the canyon. Suddenly, the wire snapped, and cut right through one of the engineer’s head, killing him instantly. The infrastructure that serves Eastern Taiwan today definitely should be credited to the countless, nameless indigenous and even colonial workers who gave their lives.
Taiwan was a Japanese colony; as such, people were only allowed to worship Japanese deities. Taiwanese traditional folk religions were suppressed, and religious artifacts were destroyed; to this day it is a painful memory for older Taiwanese people. The novel follows the plight of Puann Bing-khun (Pan Mingkun) and his family, who also had to relinquish their family deity to the Japanese.
It was a time when the wealthy could amass more wealth by dealing with the Japanese, but the destitute struggled just to survive. As a way to support his family, Puann married the deceased daughter of wealthy merchant Lim Kim-tong according to tradition [2], and made his first wife his concubine. Puann was like a puppet on strings controlled by his divorced father, his stepfather, and the father-in-law from his dead wife. The only people who treated him well were Kido and his wife, who saw Puann like the son they left in Japan. It was as if people could just treat each other with respect, if class, wealth, ethnicity, and ideologies were stripped away—just as Haisul and Kido’s youngest son Yoshio could play together.
Chu’s novel describes how the Japanese saw Taiwan’s eastern mountains as the inner mountains of their native land. Against the sharp cliff sides that haven’t changed in thousands of years, the conquests of men and women come and go like the wind and the clouds. The book’s description of Taiwan’s natural environment is also what makes the book unique.
The long wars of the Japanese warmongers led to the American bombing of Taiwan in a bid to put an end to the war. Even the Japanese in the ruling class in Taiwan were not spared the ravages of war. The starvation was unimaginable; but having to flee from air raids is something that everyone in Taiwan over the age of 85 can still remember like it was yesterday.
August of 1945 saw the surrender of the Japanese emperor. Always seeing an opportunity to make money, the merchant Lim Kim-tong placed a big order for the blue, white and red flags of the Republic of China. The father of Puann Bing-khun, who was a lackey for the Japanese, fled in the night but didn’t forget to grab some of the new flags for himself. Opportunists will always be the first to adjust to change.
For the others, even in the face of uncertainty, they banded together when the news of an American supply plane full of people crashed deep in Hainsaran. They feared the dead would become spirits that haunted their homeland, and so they put their differences aside to enter the mountain and find survivors of the crash. The latter part of the novel goes into detail of the treacherous trek up Hainsaran, and how the team doubted but still helped one another. At the end, they were not able to triumph over nature, and all 26 members perished.
In the novel, there are different ethnic groups and their traditions, however “superstitious” they may find them; there are people who are neither heroes or villains; there are confrontations between what is considered “civilized” and what is considered “ancient”; there are stories of struggling to survive and to hold on to a shred of dignity. The cruelest, yet also the most loving, is the land; Haisaran took in all those who, perhaps against their wishes, despite being from all different nations, chose Haisaran as their final resting place. The Sun Falls On Hainsaran takes the reader on a journey, through Chu’s graceful prose, of the nature and life of Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule.
(Feature photo by Krivec Ales on Pexels)
