What Taiwan is reading

Every spring, his name sprouts up all over the island. Along the creeks, deep in forests, or high on mountains, at least 20 kinds of Taiwan's indigenous plants are named after Mori Ushinosuke (森丑之助).

However, in spite of the many species of oak, fern, azalea and lichen whose scientific names include the letters "morii," this frail adventurer, who once braved the island's most treacherous torrents and cliffs to collect the first specimens of those plants, seemed destined for oblivion. He was forgotten in both Taiwan and his native Japan for nearly three quarters of a century until another scholar-adventurer ferreted out his writings from various libraries and archives and translated them into Chinese. The result, sprinkled with numerous commentaries, is Wanderings Among Aborigines (生蕃行腳).

Through Yang Nanchun's (楊南郡) indefatigable research, we now know that Mori is the man behind the camera for many of the precious photos often seen in ethnological annals that record the customs of Taiwanese aborigines in the early colonial period. Of small stature and prone to sickness, he was nonetheless fueled by a strong desire to see distant lands and learn about far-off cultures.

He arrived in Taiwan at the age of 18 to work as a Chinese translator for the Japanese army at the end of the first Sino-Japanese War. He went on to spend the rest of his short yet extraordinarily fruitful life in his adopted land. Besides a rich trove of plant specimens and photographic records, he also compiled the first dictionaries for languages used by Taiwan's non-Chinese native tribes and penned two comprehensive studies and scores of newspaper articles on the aborigine cultures he encountered throughout his wanderings.

Mainichi Shinbun of Osaka provided funds for Mori to produce an encyclopedia of Taiwan's aborigine cultures. However, no longer content with being a mere observer of the people whom he dearly loved and whose culture was dying fast under colonial rule, he advocated for an aborigine reserve deep in the mountains of Nantou (南投). It never happened. The frustrations he felt led him to commit suicide by jumping from a ship offshore Keelung in 1926. He was 49.