Tieshanzhi Vol. 2 — Taiko Pine (Dajia Pineapple Cannery)
A Taiwanese Experience of Cross-Regional Exchange: The Friendship of Xu Tiande and Tōyama Mitsuru
Text by Li Kai-yang
Taiwan, from the close of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, may be said to have passed through the most dramatic transformation in its history. In 1895, after the Qing Empire was defeated in war and ceded Taiwan to Japan, the people of the island were set upon a path of large-scale modernization. Discontented though the Taiwanese at first were with Japan as their new ruler, with the passage of time the Han Chinese resistance movements within the island had, by the mid-to-late 1910s, ceased to exist. By the 1920s, with stability achieved in matters of public health and institutional order, the Taiwanese not only travelled within the island in ever greater numbers; as the power of the Empire of Japan expanded, their reach too extended, little by little, toward central China, southern China, and Southeast Asia. After the founding of Manchukuo in 1932, a considerable proportion of Taiwanese went to that singular "paradise of the kingly way."
Nor was it only the official organs of state. Many unofficial or semi-official Japanese also found, amid the expansion of Japanese power, the possibility of striking out abroad. Most of these men came from the samurai class of the Edo period. When the Meiji Emperor decreed the "equality of the four estates," the samurai lost the privileges they had once held. Some were crushed for taking part in rebellions; others carved out their own road to "rising in the world" through military service. A smaller number among the samurai descendants took note of the shifting political situation at home and, by forming political associations to advance their own positions, became a force the government could not ignore. Tōyama Mitsuru—a native of Fukuoka and the foremost right-wing political leader of modern Japan—was just such a figure. He first joined Itagaki Taisuke's Freedom and People's Rights Movement, standing in opposition to the government. Later, in the Genyōsha that he founded together with Hiraoka Kōtarō and Hakoda Rokusuke, the first article of its creed was "reverence for the Imperial House" and the second "cherishing the nation." This shows that the earlier anti-government stance of Tōyama and his fellows sprang from a difference of ideals, not from opposition to the political reforms that followed the Restoration.
Tōyama Mitsuru, Uchida Ryōhei, and others championed "Pan-Asianism"—a program for binding together the other nations of Asia in resistance to the encroachments of the Western powers. Such an ideal began to germinate after the founding of the Kōakai in 1880 and the publication of Fukuzawa Yukichi's "Datsu-A Ron" ("Leaving Asia") in 1885; the same current of thought may be traced running through the later Tōhō Kyōkai, the Tōa Dōbunkai, the Kokuryūkai, and even the Nan'yō Kyōkai. The Genyōsha of Tōyama and his circle, and the later Kokuryūkai, were likewise among these activist groups. As early as the Genyōsha years, Tōyama and his fellows had tried to make contact with Sun Yat-sen of China and Kim Ok-gyun of Korea, and had sought to provide them with financial aid. Uchida Ryōhei went further, dispatching Takeda Hanshi, Ōsaki Shōkichi, and others to form the "Ten'yūkyō," who took part in the Donghak peasant uprising in Korea on the side of the rebellious peasants. The very name "Kokuryūkai" was likewise bound up with China: "Kokuryū" (Black Dragon) refers not to a black dragon but to the "Amur River" (Heilongjiang). The activities Tōyama and his men carried out did not necessarily represent the will of the Japanese government of the day, yet in practice their results all worked to Japan's advantage. Moreover, though Tōyama Mitsuru professed never to hold public office his whole life long, such modern Japanese politicians as Inukai Tsuyoshi and Konoe Fumimaro both embraced this ideology and were on close terms with him. Such a "flanking" group could both help the government carry out certain unofficial undertakings and, should anything go wrong, be promptly disavowed and cut loose by the Japanese government—a considerable advantage. Thus, in a number of important photographs of modern Chinese figures, we find Tōyama Mitsuru and Miyazaki Tōten in the company of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Dai Jitao, and Hu Hanmin. Sun Yat-sen's last visit to Japan, too, was hosted by Tōyama Mitsuru. It was likewise through Sun Yat-sen's introduction that Tōyama came to know the leader of free India, Subhas Chandra Bose, and that, when the Japanese government—pressed by Britain—expelled him, Tōyama privately gave him support. Although Bose later died of illness in Taipei on August 18, 1945, he stands, alongside Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) and Nehru (Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru), as one of the foremost statesmen of modern India.
Let us return to the vantage point of colonial Taiwan. How a man like Tōyama Mitsuru—who played so weighty a role in modern China, and indeed across Asia—came to be acquainted with a local family in central Taiwan is an intriguing question. For the Government-General of Taiwan, men such as Tōyama Mitsuru—like Itagaki Taisuke, who had visited Taiwan in the 1910s—held no public office, yet were political figures of the utmost importance at home. Were they to make any pronouncement while in Taiwan, the situation might well prove impossible to contain. On June 2, 1938, the Taiwan Daily News (Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpō) carried a report of Tōyama Mitsuru's coming to Taiwan. It was said that Tōyama Mitsuru, at the invitation of Xu Tiande, a wealthy man of Dajia District, was to come to Taiwan for two weeks, and meant to visit Sun Moon Lake and to call on a certain gentry household surnamed Lin at Bagua Mountain in Changhua. But the report was later denied by those close to Tōyama Mitsuru: at the time Tōyama was convalescing and had no plan to come to Taiwan. No visit was planned; yet the newspaper account suggests that the acquaintance between Tōyama Mitsuru and Xu Tiande of Waipu must have begun earlier still.
Among the Xu family documents that survive today there remains a volume by Xu Tiande, the Meishan Wengao (Meishan Manuscripts), in which clues to the exchange between the two parties may be found. In the "Account of the Conduct of My Late Eldest Son Yunzhang" that he wrote, Xu Tiande relates that of all his sons it was the eldest, Xu Yunzhang, who was the cleverest and the most adept in worldly affairs. When Yunzhang graduated at eighteen from Taichū Commercial School, the pineapple factory run by the Xu family was, just then, on the verge of being forced into a merger under the established policy of the Government-General. As Xu Yunzhang turned the matter over in his mind, he made use of his standing as a student in Japan to make contact with the Tōyama family. He wrote: "Our canned-pineapple business was oppressed by the Japanese, who were bent on seizing it by force; having resisted for years, we now faced their pressure redoubled. They were minded to cast our resistance as rebellion, and we were all but engulfed in a heaven-wide calamity. Filled with indignation, my son entered the domain of tyrannical Qin, and begged deliverance at the gate of that great champion, the venerable Tōyama." Xu Tiande's sons Yunzhang, Yunlong, and Yuncen all studied in Japan; though no definite record confirms which school Xu Yunzhang attended, he was close in age to Tōyama Mitsuru's sons Tōyama Hidezō and Tōyama Izumi, and it is more than likely that the connection was made through the younger generation. Among the Xu family's photographs from the Japanese colonial period, one can also see Xu Yunzhang himself photographed together with the Tōyama family. According to Xu Yunzhang's descendants, he once recalled that, on a certain visit to Tōyama Mitsuru's house, he met a woman in the entrance hall of the residence, and only afterward, when Tōyama Izumi told him, did he learn that she was none other than the renowned Kawashima Yoshiko.
In Xu Tiande's Meishan Suibi (Meishan Essays), there is a far more detailed account of his dealings with Tōyama Mitsuru. He recounts that in the prime of his life he threw himself into the pineapple industry. The years he gave to the pineapple enterprise were precisely those in which his third elder brother Xu Tiankui served as head of Waipu town. One can well imagine how, under the political influence of his elder brother, his enterprise flourished. After Xu Tiankui resigned as town head in 1930, the authorities wished Xu Tiande to take up the post, but he refused. When the local administrative system was revised again in 1935, the formerly government-appointed councilors were changed to half-official, half-popular ones, and the prefectural and district authorities once more approached Xu Tiande—and once more he refused. Twice declining to hold public office left, to some degree, an unfavorable impression with the authorities, who even went so far as to set men to follow him and pry into his movements. Later, when the Government-General's policy moved to bring all pineapple production under a single company, Xu Tiande defied the official will a third time, and so came under enormous pressure. According to the Meishan Suibi, from the prefecture and district above down to the police below, he was pressed again and again to wind up his pineapple business at once, and was even threatened with imprisonment. The pressure from Yokoyama Takeo, the Dajia district administrator of the time (in office from December 1936), was especially severe. Even when Xu Tiande fled the official pressure and went to Tokyo, Yokoyama went so far as to come to Tokyo to seize him and haul him back to Taiwan—fortunately, Tōyama Mitsuru stepped in to save him, and Yokoyama returned to Taiwan in dejection. Spared the calamity of prison though he was, Xu Tiande no longer dared return to Taiwan and lingered long in Tokyo. During his time in Japan, the pineapple cannery could not, in the end, escape being taken over as government property. Xu often longed to return home, but could never manage it; at last, after talking the matter over with Xu Yunzhang, it was through Tōyama Mitsuru's mediation with the Governor-General of Taiwan that he was able to return in safety. After he came back to Taiwan, the authorities again came calling and tried to make him change his name in keeping with the kōminka assimilation campaign; Xu Tiande still steadfastly refused, yet this time they made no further trouble for him.
Judging from the photographs in the Xu family's private documents, although Tōyama Mitsuru never in the end came to Taiwan, his sons Tōyama Hidezō and Tōyama Izumi did have dealings with the Xu family's Xu Yunyang, Xu Yunzhang, and others. The photographs bear no clear record of their dates, yet they suggest that the Tōyama family's coming to Taiwan may have been bound up with the inscription on the zhiwuai ("love of plants") tablet. Xu Tiande was deeply versed in Chinese classical learning, and he and Xu Tiankui were both celebrated men of letters in the locality. Tōyama Mitsuru was likewise highly accomplished in calligraphy—he had even engaged Cao Qiupu, a calligrapher native to Dadaocheng, to instruct him while Cao was sojourning in Tokyo. The Xu family preserved scrolls of calligraphy and painting that Tōyama Mitsuru and Tōyama Izumi had presented to Xu Tiande and Xu Tianxiang. The two parties "made friends through letters and the arts of the brush," much as Lin Hsien-tang and Liang Qichao had done in their day. On learning that Xu Tiande ran a pineapple factory, Tōyama Mitsuru wrote out the three characters zhiwuai ("love of plants") in his own hand to present to his friend, and Xu Tiande inscribed a commemorative text on the back of the stone tablet. The arrival of Tōyama Hidezō and Tōyama Izumi in 1938 should be closely bound up with the raising of the "love of plants" tablet. Only that year was Tōyama Hidezō released on parole after the "May 15 Incident," and within a few months he came to Taiwan in his capacity as president of the Tenkōkai. Through these traces of exchange—though it is not possible to reconstruct in full the whole course of dealings between Xu Tiande and Tōyama Mitsuru—one can nonetheless see that those great figures of the past were in fact closely bound up with Taiwan. Tōyama Mitsuru could associate with the likes of Sun Yat-sen, Hu Hanmin, and Chiang Kai-shek, and yet could also keep company with a colonial Taiwanese family, that of Xu Tiande. This lets us understand, from another angle and amid the great torrent of history, the unfolding of modern East Asia.
The Fifth Son Who Withdrew from School of His Own Will
Xu Tiande (1893–1960) was a man of the foot of Iron Anvil Mountain in Waipu, Taichung, the fifth son of Xu Qichen, the second-generation founder of the Xu family in Taiwan. Not long after Xu Tiande was born, the island of Taiwan changed hands and passed to the Japanese colonial government. What he knew before the age of twenty was the Japanese oppression of the Taiwanese; in those same years he heard, too, of the cruel scenes in many parts of the island, where people were slaughtered by the Japanese over anti-Japanese incidents.
He once entered the Governor-General's National Language School to study. While there, Xu Tiande was fond of reading books in classical Chinese. When this was discovered by people at the school, he was reprimanded, and so he chose to withdraw. He also once thought of crossing back over to the motherland, but because the Japanese police kept so close a watch on him, he felt the plan would in the end come to nothing, and never carried it out.
Dajia Pineapple
In the thirteenth year of Taishō (1924), the great Xu-Huang household in Waipu divided its property, and Xu Tiande, the youngest, received the pineapple garden in the division. His father and elder brothers had made their fortune in the Qing period through land reclamation and the rice-and-grain trade; the manufacture of canned pineapple was the Xu family's first step into the world of industry.
In the 1920s, sales of canned pineapple from the island of Taiwan grew at headlong speed. Because the barrier to entry was low, the considerable export volumes drew industrialists from both the island and the Japanese mainland alike into the trade—among them Xu Tiande. He founded, in the then-uncommon manner of a sole proprietorship, the "Taiko Pineapple Cannery (Dajia Pineapple Cannery Guild)," and ran a pineapple farm at Meishan to supply raw material to the factory, which turned out canned pineapple for export.
The Helmsman
Unlike his younger brother's tense relations with the Japanese side, Xu Tiande's third elder brother Xu Tiankui, for the sake of the family's survival, chose to enter the colonizers' bureaucratic system, serving throughout the 1920s as head of Waipu town. This period was also the time when Xu Tiande rode high in his enterprise.
The first day of October, the second year of Shōwa (1927).
Xu Tiande is the man in dark glasses, in the middle of the second row.
New Blood for Dajia Pineapple
Xu Yunyang (1913–2008) was a man of the foot of Iron Anvil Mountain in Waipu, Taichung, and a graduate of Waseda University in Japan. His father was Xu Tianxiang, Xu Tiande's fourth elder brother. The eldest son, Xu Yunyang went on, after graduating from Taichū First Middle School, to study in the Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University, and held his wedding in the eleventh year of Shōwa (1936), which Xu Tiande too attended with his whole family. After the wedding, Xu Yunyang duly graduated.
From left: Xu Yunyang, Xu Yuntang (the third brother), Xu Yuncong (the fourth brother), Xu Huang Xiuluan.
After returning to Taiwan, Xu Yunyang took part in the "Dajia District Cooperative Reverence-and-Living Leaders' Training Assembly." In this body, the chief secretaries and chairmen of the town agricultural cooperatives gathered at regular intervals and rigorously carried out spiritual training, tempering their characters through trials of endurance. At the same time he served as an officer of the "Taichū Prefecture Industrial Cooperative." By such means Xu Yunyang bettered himself and widened his web of connections.
Beyond such outside groups, Xu Yunyang's family had also built up a solid web of personal ties. At that time the Xu family was led by the Taiko Pineapple Cannery run by his uncle Xu Tiande, and the family's fortunes seemed to be at their very zenith.
And yet, an undertow was already stirring beneath the surface. At this very moment Dajia Pineapple began to come under pressure from the newly appointed district administrator—just as Xu Yunyang had entered the family's pineapple cannery to work.
Xu Yunyang is fourth from the left in the back row.
Xu Yunyang is first from the right in the back row.
Crisis
The pineapple enterprise made Xu Tiande rich, yet a few years on it turned, little by little, into a crisis.
After Xu Tiankui stepped down as town head in the fifth year of Shōwa (1930), the authorities had intended Xu Tiande to take up the post, but he politely declined. In 1935 they again invited him to serve as a government-appointed councilor under the reorganized system, and again met with a gentle rebuff. These two refusals made Xu Tiande a problem figure in the eyes of the authorities. From then on, whenever he went out of the district, there were men watching his movements.
In June of the tenth year of Shōwa (1935), the Taiwan Gōdō Pineapple Company was established. This was an established policy of the Government-General: to buy up and consolidate all the pineapple factories of Taiwan into a single company. After its founding, of the seventy-eight pineapple factories in all of Taiwan, seventy-seven were absorbed into it. The one and only that would not compromise was the Taiko Pineapple Cannery: Xu Tiande would not sell his factory to the Taiwan Gōdō Pineapple Company, wishing to keep the right to operate independently, and from then on the Taiko Pineapple Cannery became a thorn in the side of the Government-General.
That same year (1935), Xu Tiande's third elder brother Xu Tiankui died, and the Xu family's influence in local politics during the Japanese colonial period came to a close.
Yokoyama Takeo, the Dajia District Administrator
When all the pineapple factories of Taiwan had been merged, Dajia Pineapple alone went on resisting. Over the years that followed, the Government-General, prefecture, district, and local police brought to bear every kind of intimidation, by word and by force alike, even threatening to charge Xu Tiande and throw him into prison; under such coercion he fled far away to Tokyo.
In December of the eleventh year of Shōwa (1936), Yokoyama Takeo took office as the Dajia district administrator. The Taiko Pineapple Cannery's stubborn refusal of the merger exasperated him, and he resolved to mobilize every resource to bring Xu Tiande to heel. Yokoyama Takeo once set out from Dajia and went to Tokyo to hunt down Xu Tiande, only to abandon the attempt when Tōyama Mitsuru intervened to stop him.
The "Venerable Tōyama, the Great Champion" as Xu Tiande Called Him
The story of this man Tōyama Mitsuru may be taken up with the May 15 Incident. The May 15 Incident was an abortive coup launched on May 15 of the seventh year of Shōwa (1932) by junior officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy; among those who took part were cadets of the Imperial Japanese Army and surviving members of the League of Blood Incident. The right-wing forces of Japan that Tōyama Mitsuru represented put into action an assassination they had long been planning: Inukai Tsuyoshi, the prime minister of the day, was shot dead in a hail of bullets at his official residence, to the shock of the world.
Tōyama Mitsuru had two sons: the elder, Tōyama Izumi, and the younger, Tōyama Hidezō. Tōyama Hidezō, too, was sentenced in the trial over the May 15 Incident.
Drawing the timeline back to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the famous assassinations connected with Tōyama Mitsuru also number such events as the attempts on the lives of Li Hongzhang and Itō Hirobumi.
Tōyama Mitsuru was on good terms with the revolutionaries of East Asia: China's Sun Yat-sen, Korea's Kim Ok-gyun, and India's Bose all received aid of one kind or another from him. It would be no exaggeration to say that the deeds of this white-haired old man shaped the course of East Asian history as a whole.
Tōyama Mitsuru is the white-bearded man in the middle.
The Stone of Friendship
In the spring of the twelfth year of Shōwa (1937), the zhiwuai ("love of plants") tablet, emblem of the friendship between Tōyama Mitsuru and the Xu family, was set up at Xu Tiande's residence. Though the stone bore an inscription, carved in seal script, of gentle tenderness toward growing things, it weighed upon the hearts of the colonial authorities like a great stone, and the colonial government of the day held it in dread. What was not carved into the stone was the delicate relationship among the colonizer, the colonized, and the powerful men of the home country.
That same year, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident broke out and the Sino-Japanese War began. The place the Taiwanese still called their motherland became, in an instant, an enemy country.
Did Tōyama Hidezō Come to Taiwan to Mediate?
The Taiwan Daily News of the thirteenth year of Shōwa (1938) carried several reports, by turns speculating about and clarifying Tōyama Mitsuru's coming to Taiwan. That June, Lin Hsien-tang's diary recorded the following about the dealings between Tōyama Mitsuru and Xu Tiande:
林清經三時餘來訪，述大甲許天德之鳳梨工場不肯賣渡合同會社，因是受當局之壓逼，其製品欲輸出，船舶不肯為之載，甚至欲取消其製造權，於是乃拜託頭山滿翁為之盡力，諸事皆能如意，從此每年利益約近百萬円云。 ——— Lin Qingjing came to call a little after three o'clock and related that Xu Tiande of Dajia, whose pineapple factory would not sell out to the Gōdō Company, was for that reason being pressured by the authorities: when he sought to export his products, the steamships would not carry them, and the authorities even wished to revoke his manufacturing license. He therefore entreated the venerable Tōyama Mitsuru to exert himself on his behalf, and in all things matters turned out as he wished; from then on his yearly profits came to nearly a million yen.
On the twenty-sixth of November that same year, Tōyama Mitsuru's second son, Tōyama Hidezō, came ashore at the port of Keelung aboard the Yamato Maru, and once met with the Governor-General of Taiwan.
The twenty-sixth of November, the thirteenth year of Shōwa (1938)
[By telephone from Keelung] The liner Yamato Maru arrived outside the port of Keelung at three o'clock on the afternoon of the 25th. Aboard were 710 passengers, the notable among them being Mr. Tōyama Hidezō of the Tokiwamatsu Sword Research Institute, Mr. Hara Kichitarō, director of Tōkai Jidōsha, and Mr. Hatano Iwatarō, director of the Kada-gumi, and others. At the time of the May 15 Incident there was a so-called great man of the private sphere, Mr. Tōyama Hidezō, who has many friends in Taiwan. After landing in Taiwan, Hidezō, too, once met and conversed with the Governor-General of Taiwan. Hidezō has no particular mission; he plans only to spend ten days on an inspection tour and then return. As for swords and the like, he has brought but a trifling number with him to Taiwan.
On that ten-day journey, Tōyama Hidezō went to Waipu to call on the Xu family, and Xu Tiande went to the trouble of building a guesthouse to receive the Tōyama party. They were photographed in the pineapple garden with Iron Anvil Mountain as the backdrop—perhaps owing to the weather of the day, the ridgeline of Iron Anvil Mountain shows only faintly in the background.
Xu Huang Xiuluan is holding her eldest son, Xu Zuozong.
The Dissolution of Dajia Pineapple
After four years of resistance, the Taiko Pineapple Cannery, owing to the wartime controls on raw materials, met in the end the fate of dissolution. The zhiwuai tablet of those later days was no longer ringed by the plants of its first setting up; the ground around it lay bare with earth and stone, the green gone, while the crowd before it gazed into the camera with resolute faces.
Four months after Dajia Pineapple was dissolved, Yokoyama Takeo was promoted to mayor of Keelung.
The eleventh of February, the fourteenth year of Shōwa (1939)
In the hope that the pineapple industry might flourish under its administration, the Government-General of Taiwan, around the tenth year of Shōwa (1935), undertook to coordinate the merger of all the island's canned-pineapple manufacturers and established the "Gōdō Pineapple Company." At that time, at Liufen in Waipu town, Dajia District, there was the Taiko Pineapple Cannery, the one and only guild that did not fall in with the authorities, that stood outside the Government-General's policy and was run by an outside figure; it persisted independently as a competitor, and its factories and farms were expanding besides—its cannery, automated can-making factories (two of them, old and new), and farms had grown to 92 jiǎ of land, with an annual output reaching 920,000 cases. This raised many obstacles to controlling the industry. Thereafter the Government-General, at every opportunity, pressed it to merge. But after the outbreak of hostilities, when the government ran into difficulties in the allocation of steel and of the tinplate used in making cans, Tabata Kōzaburō, Director of the Bureau of Productive Industries, strenuously brokered the merger, and as a result the Dajia Pineapple side gradually came round to the proposal. The contract for the merger of the two was then signed in Tokyo on the first of February this year. For the sum of 550,000 yen, in less than ten days the Government-General had bought up in their entirety the land and the structures upon it belonging to Dajia Pineapple, and succeeded to its enterprise. With this, a matter long pending has now wholly disappeared. The pineapple industry has thus achieved unified control.
Xu Yunyang is the second person counting from the far right of the photograph.
A Stranger in a Foreign Land
Xu Tiande, having fled to Tokyo, lived there a very long while. In that time his sons married and had children one after another, and Xu Tiande became a grandfather. The Xu family, meanwhile, kept up its ties with the Tōyama family.
A group photograph of Xu Tiande's descendants.
The man with the white beard and the man with the black beard in the middle are, respectively, Tōyama Mitsuru and Xu Tiande.
The Closing Days of the War
In the closing phase of the war, the aged Tōyama Mitsuru would still meet with political leaders from far and wide.
Suenaga Misao (third from left) and Ōkuma Asajirō (fourth from left) photographed with members of the Xu family.
In the nineteenth year of Shōwa (1944), as the fortunes of war waned and the people of Tokyo were evacuating in droves, the thought of returning home stirred once more in Xu Tiande. He entrusted Tōyama Mitsuru to speak with the then Governor-General of Taiwan, so that he might return safely to Taiwan and bring his long sojourn in a foreign land to an end.
Turning our gaze back to Taiwan: with the tightening controls on raw materials and the ever-fiercer fighting, all those who remained in Waipu seemed weary as well.
Commemoration of a small arts performance held at the standing nursery of Waipu town's primary school.
Commemoration of the Taichū Prefecture Industrial Cooperative officers' training assembly.
In the span between his entering Dajia Pineapple and Xu Tiande's return to Taiwan, Xu Yunyang's sons and daughters were born one after another.
In the late Japanese colonial period, the war reached the Xu family, and Xu Yunyang's fourth brother Xu Yuncong was conscripted by the Empire of Japan. It is said that their father, Xu Tianxiang, was so anxious on the day before Xu Yuncong set out that he could not sleep, and sat the whole night through in the courtyard.
Xu Tiande is first from the left in the front row.
Xu Yuncong is second from the left in the front row.
Xu Yunyang is first from the right in the front row.
Xu Tianxiang, third from the right, is holding Xu Zuoqing.
Parting and Reunion
Tōyama Mitsuru passed away in October of the nineteenth year of Shōwa (1944).
Bose died in a plane crash at Taipei's Songshan Airport three days after Japan's surrender, just as he was about to fly from Taipei to Manchuria to seek negotiations and cooperation with the Soviet Union.
Xu Yunzhang died in an air raid the day before the United States dropped the atomic bomb, at the age of thirty-one.
Because the war ended early, Xu Yuncong, at Dadaocheng and before he had yet boarded ship, was told that he could go home. He spent every cent he had treating his fellow soldiers to food and drink in celebration, and by the time he reached Tieshan there was not a coin left.
Having taken leave of the heavy air of war, Xu Yuncong returned home, and the Xu family welcomed a happy occasion of its own.
Retrocession
After the Retrocession, Xu Tiande set up a Confucius tablet on Iron Anvil Mountain. One passage of its inscription reads thus:
台民際曆象重光勝緣千載其誠其愉又必超越乎各地者矣 ——— The people of Taiwan, amid the turning of the calendar and the constellations, behold the light restored through the Retrocession—a happy karma garnered over a thousand years; the sincerity and the joy of it must surely surpass all that the people of other lands can feel.
"The people of Taiwan, through the changing of the reign-names, have, with the Retrocession, seen the light return once more; this is good karma accumulated over a thousand years, and the sincerity of this joy must be something the people of other places can scarcely feel."
The 375 Rent Reduction, put into effect in the fortieth year of the Republic (1951), greatly affected landlords such as the Xu family. In the forty-fifth year of the Republic (1956), Xu Tiande's wife Xu Lin Yue passed away. During his years in Japan, most of his enterprises in Taiwan had been managed by Xu Lin Yue. After the Retrocession, he set about untangling the property troubles left by the wartime chaos. Xu Tiande raised objections with the Nationalist government on several occasions, holding that the sum paid for the purchase of Dajia Pineapple during the Japanese colonial period had been unreasonable and hoping to win a fitting amount, but in the end every such effort came to nothing.
Xu Tiande passed away in the forty-ninth year of the Republic (1960), and was buried with his wife on Iron Anvil Mountain. After his death, Tōyama Izumi once came to Taiwan to visit the stone tablet his father and Xu Tiande had set up together, and to call on the Xu family's friends. He also visited the place where the Xu family had made their start, Iron Anvil Mountain.
Tōyama Izumi also called on Xu Yunyang.
After the Retrocession, Xu Yunyang was elected to two terms as the popularly chosen head of Waipu township.
Commemorative photograph of the handover ceremony between the outgoing and incoming township heads at the third term of Waipu Township, Taichung County; one can make out Xu Tiande (fourth from left, front row) and Xu Yunyang (ninth from left, front row).
During his first term as township head, Xu Yunyang passed the examination for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' special representatives stationed in Taiwan, and thereupon resigned his post as township head to take up office in Taipei. His tenure there fell roughly between 1946 and 1947, and so he lived through the February 28 Incident. When the incident broke out, his mainlander colleagues all fled to the mainland; though they came through unscathed, they were able to claim relief payments. As the sole native Taiwanese in the office, he too remarked offhandedly that he ought to be compensated, only to be brushed off on the pretext that the money would not stretch so far. After two years at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs he returned to Waipu and took over the family business.
Daiyakubō
Xu Yunyang passed away in 2008, having raised five sons; the third son, Xu Zuoqing, is my grandfather. I often looked at old photographs together with him. In the course of sorting through them, I came upon, quite by chance, an old photograph framed from an angle looking out from the pineapple garden toward Iron Anvil Mountain. The reason it left so deep an impression is that I myself had once taken a photograph from this very angle. Because the pineapple garden lies on the higher ground to the south, one looking northward can gaze out at Iron Anvil Mountain in the distance—for me, an image of looking back toward our ancestral home. I could not help wondering: who took this photograph?
Later, in an oral-history record, I came across something most intriguing: the descendants of Xu Tiande who had moved to Japan, after naturalizing as Japanese, took the name "Daiyakubō" ("gazing at the great peak"). Looking at the great mountain, my mind turned at once to that photograph.
The pineapple garden of today has become an industrial zone. The residence where Xu Tiande lived in those years is now home to no member of the Xu family. The zhiwuai tablet lies hidden deep within the pineapple garden, unknown to the world.
On a warm, sunlit winter's day at the end of 2022, I went with my grandfather, my eldest uncle, and the descendants of Xu Tiande to the pineapple garden to look in on the zhiwuai tablet. That day I told them of my discovery, then led them to the spot in the photograph and took for them a picture looking out toward Iron Anvil Mountain.
Text: Li Kai-yang, Wei-Chen Li
Proofreading: Tsai Chia-huan
Image editing: Wei-Chen Li
Old-photograph archiving and provision: Xu Ruicheng, Xu Ruiyi
Book design: Chou Fang-yu