Afterwards I made several trips to Keelung, but without my camera. And once, quite by accident, I learned how strongly fortified that port is at the present time, and with what ingenuity the fortifications are concealed. But that forms no part of the present narrative....
The fact that I had taken a “photographic apparatus” to Keelung was recorded against me in the police records of Taihoku, and brought several calls of an inquisitorial nature from the police.
To inquisitorial calls from the police and from other Japanese officials, however, I became accustomed during my residence in Formosa. My object in going there was to devote my leisure time—that not engaged in teaching—to the study of the aboriginal tribes of the island. There were reports—reports confirmed and denied—of a pigmy race among the aborigines. These reports still further stimulated my interest. I knew there were really pigmies—the Aetas—in the Philippines. Were there, or were there not, such people in the mountains of Formosa? I determined to find out.
My teaching duties occupied only four days a week. The other three days of each week, besides all the days of the rather frequent vacations, were supposedly my own, to employ as I felt inclined. It was supposed apparently by both school officials and police officials (the duties of the two seem curiously interlinked in the Japanese Empire) that inclination would lead me to devote this leisure to attending tea-parties at the houses of the missionaries in the city and to distributing pocket Testaments among the young men of the school. My predecessor (who had resigned the school-post in order to take up avowed missionary work) had, it seemed, so devoted her leisure, and to the mind of Japanese officialdom it was incomprehensible that what one seiyō-jin woman had done all others should not, as a matter of course, wish to do. When it was learned that my inclination lay in another direction—that of tramping the island, especially the mountains, and getting into as close touch as possible with the aborigines—I received several calls from horrified officials. The Director of Schools was especially insistent (he said he was requested to be so by the Chief of the Police Department) in wishing to know why I was not satisfied with ricksha-rides about the city. This after I had made him understand that I was not a missionary and that I was not particularly interested in either pink teas or Testament distribution. “Why you want to walk?” he demanded. “Japanese ladies never walk; only coolie-women walk.”
I explained that obviously I was not a Japanese, also that I was not at all certain that I was a lady, and that if the distinction between coolie-woman and lady lay in the fact that the one walked and the other did not, I much preferred being classed in the former category.
He scratched his head rather violently—a Japanese habit when puzzled or annoyed. Suddenly the light of a great idea seemed to dawn upon him. “Ah,” he exclaimed exultantly, the recollection of some missionary speech or sermon evidently being made to serve the occasion, “but they will say you are immoral, and Christian ladies do not like to be thought immoral.”
This struck me as being amusing—for several reasons.
“Yes,” I said, “and who is likely to think me immoral?”
“Oh, everybody,” he answered impressively. “And they will publish it in the papers—all the Japanese papers in the city, and in the island,” he emphasized, “that you are immoral. And, anyhow, you must do in Rome as the Romans do,” he added triumphantly, evidently thinking he had convicted me out of the mouth of one of the sages of my own Western world. Ever afterwards this: “Do in Rome as the Romans do” was a favourite phrase of his when he tried to insist upon my regulating my life in every detail upon the model of that of a Japanese woman.
