In the footsteps of soldiers
“With the passing of Spring, blossoms fly away on the wind / And though festivals come and go, departed loved ones still do not return / I remember the green, green willows / When they left for far away….” In the Taiwan of the 1970s and 1980s, this song, “Memory,” was an essential piece for choirs. The music was composed by Kuo Tzu-chiu, a teacher at NHSHS, who was known as “the father of music in Hualien.”
The words of the song, though written after WWII, could just as well describe the fate of the Japanese who had migrated to Taiwan under colonial rule. Some went off to fight in WWII, while others returned to Japan, never to return, after the Japanese defeat. Each building they left behind carries historical memories.
After NHSHS was founded in 1936, dormitories were built for its teachers according to the specifications for junior officials’ dormitories under regulations decreed by the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office, and included a Grade A residence that was built to the highest standard provided for. This building, which is no longer extant, was allocated to high-ranking military officers who were hired from Japan to come and teach in Taiwan.
Jhong Hong-cheng, executive director of the Kuo Tzu Chiu Culture and Art Foundation, explains: “It was only the residence for a high-ranking official that had both a porch outside the entrance and a vestibule inside. The herringbone or ‘palm-frond’ patterns on the pillars of the porch and on the ceiling of the children’s room symbolized that this was a Japanese colonial territory in the South Pacific.”
Naturally, one no longer sees teachers here wearing military uniform and bearing samurai swords. The weather-beaten teachers’ dorms have been restored, and one of them now serves as a cultural hall commemorating Kuo Tzu-chiu.
The poet Chen Li described Kuo, who was his high-school music teacher, as “a legendary musician of Taiwan.” His works included “Memory,” “Your Coming,” and other standards for choirs. Kuo was born into a poor family and only graduated from elementary school. In 1946 he was hired to teach music at NHSHS, and worked hard to supplement his education, earning his junior and senior high school certificates and a junior college degree.
Kuo’s motto was, “If you’re poor you have to improvise, and if you can improvise you can get through,” and he put this philosophy into practice in music education. He invented an electrically powered audiovisual device for teaching staff notation of music. He himself drew up the design, then asked an electrician to make a light board of the musical staff attached to an organ keyboard, so that when the note C was played on the organ, the position on the staff corresponding to C would light up. Combining the senses of hearing and vision, the device helped students to learn better.
Having tapped on reproductions of an organ keyboard and an 80-year-old typewriter, we set off again on our journey, headed for the Meilun River.
Along the Meilun River is a row of Japanese-style dormitories, with towering Chinese tallow trees shading the wooden buildings from the scorching sun. After they were built in 1928 as living quarters for military officers, one of the buildings, known as the “General’s House,” became the official residence of the highest-ranking Japanese officer in Hualien and Taitung, Colonel Mitsuo Nakamura. Located in a pine grove at the foot of Mt. Meilun, it was his office and military command center.
Our guide on this day, cultural volunteer Li Yongzhen, is 90, the same age as the General’s House.
Li explains, “The term ‘wansei’ referred to Japanese born in Taiwan under Japanese rule. I had one wansei classmate who joined the kamikaze force near the end of WWII, and never came back.” Six years ago, other wansei classmates came back to NHSHS from Japan to attend a school reunion. Everyone was saying to each other, “So you are still alive!” It was quite a moving scene.
This ceiling in the Kuo Tzu-chiu Music Culture Hall was constructed by first making a layer of roller-crushed sugarcane stems, then applying a thick coating of lime, and finally handcrafting the herringbone pattern with a brush.