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Paper short abstract

Polymath Kano Tadao, in his 1920s-1930s Atayal and Bunun peoples-aided mountain fieldwork treks, encountered various ways to categorize and map Taiwan’s two tallest mountains, challenging the dominant Japanese taxonomy of the colonial alpine landscape.

Paper long abstract

In 1925, eighteen-year-old Kano Tadao moved from Tokyo to Taipei to attend the newly established Taipei Higher School, with an ulterior motive to collect insects in the Taiwanese mountains. A childhood hobby that at age twelve led to his first academic publication, Kano by the mid-1920s had scoured to this end the empire’s northern ranges and hills, in Kamikōchi, Hokkaidō, Sakhalin, and more. Kano’s Higher School days found him more in Taiwan’s mountains than in classrooms, and he returned to the ridges annually during his metropolitan university years, by which time the study of these peaks and their inhabitants had become his career. His field writings have been dubbed paean to alpine Taiwan that Kano cherished over the empire’s other peaks, capturing their colorful beauty better than any camera possibly could.

This paper explores Kano’s youthful mountaineering trips to the regions surrounding the two tallest peaks in Taiwan: Tsugitaka (A: Sekuwan, C: Xueshan, E: Sylvia) and Niitaka (B: Tongku Saveq, C: Yushan, E: Morrison/Jade). It argues that Kano, by this time a professional entomologist, geologist, geographer, and ethnographer, sought to identify and add to the multiple ways in which these two regions were categorized and mapped, to imagine alpine Taiwan as a kaleidoscope of overlapping visions. Working closely with Atayal aboriginal guides in his Tsugitaka climbs and Bunun guides in the Niitaka region, Kano learnt of their taxonomies, often linked to their hunting and farming, that were critical to their lives and Kano’s survival during his fieldwork. These categorizations co-existed with the Japanese mapping of the archipelagic spaces, peoples, politics, and resources that began soon after occupation in 1895 and Kano in the mid-1920s to the early 1930s continued to qualify and correct. He added to these taxonomies his own findings reached with indispensable aboriginal aids, including those surrounding altitudinal animal distribution that was the first of its kind and which eventually became his doctoral dissertation. In the process, Kano challenged the Government General’s narrow understanding of the central Taiwanese mountains that claimed authority through science, although fundamentally he remained an apologist for the Japanese occupation of the archipelago.