Taiwan Today

A forthcoming movie is the latest exploration of the Wushe Incident and the complicated history of Taiwan’s Sediq peoples.

In what promises to be a high-adrenaline film, acclaimed Taiwanese filmmaker Wei Te-sheng, the director of the 2008 sleeper hit Cape No.7, is taking on one of Taiwan’s most compelling, and tragic, historical figures, Mona Rudao. Mona Rudao was the aboriginal tribal chief who led a group of Dkedaya, one branch of the Sediq tribe, in an uprising in 1930 known as the Wushe Incident. While the film, entitled Seediq Bale, which means “a real man,” is scheduled for release in summer 2011, a short trailer provides some clues to its perspective on the subject matter, which takes place at the time Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). It portrays Mona Rudao as an aboriginal patriot determined to go honorably to the house of his ancestors with the blood of his enemies on his hands. In one scene, the chief vows he will resist the Japanese despite the enemy being as numerous “as leaves in the forest.”

It is a stirring trailer, but the historical figure and the reality of the events that made him famous may be more nuanced and tragic than any movie could depict. Indeed, some worry the movie could reopen wounds that have at long last healed.

Seediq Bale is only the latest in a string of television programs, books and even comic books and video games, however, that have transformed the erstwhile tribal leader into a legend. At the time, the Wushe Incident gained notoriety in Japan and was used to build popular support for the empire’s conquest across Asia. Later administrations in Taiwan transformed the event into propaganda depicting native “Chinese” patriotic resistance to the Japanese.

To some of those for whom Mona Rudao is not a legend—but an actual ancestor whose actions directly impacted the lives of his people—the use of his story is troubling. “It should have been a documentary,” says Takun Walis, a Dkedaya Sediq, whose grandparents died in the aftermath of the uprising. “Then they could have told the truth about Mona Rudao and the incident,” says the Nantou County children’s center manager, who was among those consulted by the production company for Seediq Bale. “Any fictional movie is going to make it somehow beautiful. It wasn’t. It was sad.”

Dkedaya Sediq
chief Mona Rudao
(Photo courtesy
of Renai Township
Office, Nantou County)

Sad—and bloody. On the morning of October 27, 1930, the people of Wushe, a small village in Renai Township nestled deep in the mountains of Nantou County, central Taiwan, gathered to participate in the local elementary school’s sports day. The gathering included a large number of Japanese students, teachers, parents and local administrators of the Japanese colonial government. Unbeknownst to the gathering, Mona Rudao and 300 of his warriors surrounded the school. An article in the Free China Press in 1992 reports, “At 8 a.m., as everyone sang the Japanese national anthem and watched the flag raising, a young sword-wielding tribesman vaulted the wall and rushed onto the playing field. There he beheaded a local official.”

Shortly thereafter, 134 Japanese men, women and children lay dead—
gunned down, their throats slashed or beheaded by Mona Rudao’s warriors—along with two Taiwanese, one a young girl who had the misfortune of wearing a kimono that day. Photographs taken soon afterwards show corpses piled up in classrooms where the people had tried to seek refuge from the marauders. Another 215 Japanese were wounded in the attack.

Shock of the Attack

Cheng Yang-en, a history professor at Taiwan Theological College and Seminary in Taipei who has worked closely with aboriginal groups, says the incident “came as a shock to both the Japanese people and the leadership of the colonial government.” Scott Simon, a professor of anthropology at the University of Ottawa in Canada and a scholar of Sediq culture, concurs, saying, “Wushe was a model village—a model of Japanese colonial governance.”

Taiwan’s aboriginals are Austronesian speakers, members of a far-flung linguistic group that includes cultures from Easter Island to Madagascar. When the Dutch first arrived in Taiwan in the early 17th century, it is estimated that at least 23 languages were spoken among indigenous tribes. Over the centuries, the Pingpu—or plains aboriginals—gradually assumed the customs, language and even surnames of the majority Han and for the most part became assimilated within that culture. Meanwhile, members of the mountain tribes maintained their customary lifestyles deep in Taiwan’s mountain ranges beyond the reach of Qing-dynasty rule over Taiwan (1683–1895).

When Japan took control of the island in 1895, authorities immediately set about not only quelling widespread resistance from the local Han population, but also subduing these remaining tribes. Cheng Yang-en notes it took the Japanese a long time, almost two decades, using “all the military muscle they could muster.”

The last of the aboriginals to resist, the Truku, held onto their mountain homeland in Taroko Gorge, eastern Taiwan until 1914. When they were finally conquered in what is known as the Taroko Incident, the Taiwanese “frontier” came to an end. What followed were wholesale attempts at the “Japanization” of aboriginals through mass enculturation into Japanese language, culture and religion. As part of this process, potential leaders were identified and sent to Japan for education and to learn an appreciation of the power of Japan. As Scott Simon says, “The Japanese really wanted to awe these people.”

One of those so identified was the young Mona Rudao, whose lineage as the son of Bai Rudao, a great chief, and his skill with the Japanese language, earned him this privilege. According to Cheng Yang-en, upon returning to Taiwan, Mona Rudao consistently preached cooperation with the Japanese overlords, citing the futility of resisting an enemy so numerous and advanced. For more than a decade, Mona Rudao skillfully led his people in their relations with the Japanese police, ameliorating conflicts and working to ensure his people were treated well. This history, then, makes his turnabout from pacifist into war leader all the more surprising.

Scott Simon observes, though, that while Mona Rudao may have understood the power of the Japanese military, he also understood firsthand the injustice of the colonial administration. He notes that Mona Rudao “saw the disparity between the way people were treated in Japan and the way his people were treated.” Simon feels this sense of injustice may have contributed to the leader’s outrage.

Certainly the aboriginals had significant grievances. Japan’s policy of civil service forced all the men to supply labor for infrastructure projects, for which they were paid poorly if at all. Perhaps more significantly, the deforestation of their native lands led to great resentment among the tribes. The trade in oil from camphor trees fed Hollywood’s appetite for celluloid film, while hinoki timber was used for Shinto temples in Japan.

Scott Simon emphasizes that this industrial-scale deforestation of their traditional lands violated the Sediq’s belief in Gaya—the sacred law of the universe, which includes all aspects of life. He observes that the people felt the abuse of their lands as an insult not just against them, but also the universe. Moreover, Gaya also pertains to freedom and equality and Simon says even today the Sediq are renowned for their individualism, libertarianism and strong distrust of authority. He says he often heard the phrase, “we love freedom” when spending time in their villages, and that the idea of a state “violated their moral principles of equality.”

As these grievances simmered, the spark that set off the conflagration involved something more down to earth; a snubbed wedding toast, cultural miscommunication and bruised honor. Earlier that same month, at the wedding for Mona Rudao’s son, the local Japanese constable refused a toast from the young groom, saying he would not accept wine from someone with the blood of animals on his hands. A fight broke out between the police officer and the groom. Reports indicate that Mona Rudao’s family, perhaps understanding the severity of the transgression, sent wine to the officer as a gesture of goodwill, but this too was refused.

Cheng Yang-en notes that in those days an aboriginal village would have just a few institutions: a school, civil service office and police station. Of these three, the police would have had the greatest power. Cheng says that at the wedding of Mona Rudao’s son, the police officer would probably have been regarded as the “owner” of the ceremony, raising the tension level if “he didn’t behave in a good cultural sense.” Police officers also often married aboriginal women to further integration, but many abandoned their wives when assigned to different districts, as had happened to Mona Rudao’s sister. This violated not only Sediq principles, but also Mona Rudao’s family honor.

Complex Character

Research conducted at Taiwan Theological Seminary questions the simplified image of Mona Rudao as an aboriginal patriot, and instead paints the picture of a father and brother driven to avenge his family’s honor. That he was able to muster such a large force points to another strategic error the Japanese may have made: forcing the Sediq to abandon their nomadic lifestyles and live together in large-scale stationary villages.

Scott Simon notes that originally the Sediqs lived in small semi-nomadic bands of 30–50 people and were very suspicious of any one individual holding too much power. He observes that “the Japanese process of civilization allowed them to band together into a super-tribe.” The respect and status accorded Mona Rudao due to his lineage and Japanese education no doubt helped him to assemble an army of warriors willing to follow him into battle.

During Japan’s colonial rule, Japanese ethnologists identified nine different linguistic groups among Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, although designating tribes along those lines was always problematic given that many of the peoples within those groups had little sense of solidarity with each other. The Sediq speakers were lumped into the Atayal language group, which spread across the northern end of the Central Mountains, but while the languages do share some characteristics, many people say they are mutually unintelligible.

Even among the three main groups of Sediq speakers, the Doda, Dkedaya and Truku, the shared linguistic and cultural traits did not necessarily create a sense of civic solidarity. In fact, all the groups were headhunters with each other as their targets.

Headhunting, however, did not have the same meaning as warfare, according to Scott Simon. “It was a religious ceremony,” he says. He explains that small groups of Sediqs lived on the riverbanks—moving up and down them, planting crops as they went, then returning to harvest, as well as hunting in the mountains between the watercourses. If two members of separate bands were locked in an intractable dispute, each side would form a headhunting party. He explains that the party that actually took an enemy head, or at least did not suffer any casualties, clearly had the favor of Gaya—and so were right.

Not only did this ritual show the disposition of the heavens, but it also allowed the men to earn the tattoos they needed to enter the afterlife. It is important to note, though, that as far as Simon’s research indicates, headhunting was rare. In the case of the Sediqs, if one member of a headhunting party took a head, all the members had the right to get the needed tattoos.

The Japanese exploited these ancient enmities to leverage one tribe against the other. Dkedaya Sediqs fought for the Japanese against the Truku in the Taroko Incident of 1914, and Mona Rudao’s father, Bai Rudao, allegedly made his name in battle against the Doda. In the wake of the Wushe Incident, the Japanese responded by quickly mobilizing a force of 1,381 aboriginal mercenaries—mainly Doda and Truku warriors—to fight alongside 1,163 Japanese police officers and 800 soldiers. They used artillery, tear gas (by some accounts poison gas) and even aerial bombardment to pound the rebels into surrender.

Mona Rudao’s rebel army soon recognized the hopelessness of their situation, and by early December 1930, Mona Rudao was dead, having hanged himself in a cave where the rebels had holed up to resist the massed strength of the Japanese military. The rebellion collapsed shortly afterwards. Of the roughly 1,200 Dkedaya Sediq who participated in the uprising, more than 700 died either in conflict or by suicide. The remaining 500 surrendered to the Japanese.

In what is considered the Second Wushe Incident, however, Doda and Truku mercenaries, who were paid a bounty for heads taken, are believed to have massacred some 200 of the surrendered Dkedaya. Photos from the time show Japanese soldiers crouched before a huge pile of Dkedaya heads taken as a result of the conflict.

The very few Dkedaya survivors of the two Wushe incidents—older people, children, a few men and women—were moved to an island in the middle of the Beigang River in Nantou County that Scott Simon describes as a de facto concentration camp and stripped of their rights to travel or work freely. To prevent them from trying to return to their ancestral lands, Doda were moved into traditionally Dkedaya regions.

It is against the backdrop of this complicated and difficult history that the movie Seediq Bale is to be released. But given this painful past, is there a risk of reopening these old wounds? Takun Walis fears the production might rekindle dark memories. On the other hand, Watan Diro, a Presbyterian minister and Doda Sediq activist, says that with the passage of time the various Sediq groups are once again “all brothers.”

Path Toward Forgiveness

Diro feels that the widespread acceptance of Christianity among Sediqs has helped them “find the path toward forgiveness.” He adds that church activism played a big role in reducing tensions between Sediq groups, and now that three generations have already passed, “we can put history behind us.” Walis echoes the theme of forgiveness. “We can’t change the past and we can never forget the past, but we can learn from it and we can forgive,” he says.

Diro says that the tragedy of the Second Wushe Incident was a direct result of Japanese exploitation of ancient tribal enmities between the Doda, Dkedaya and Truku. But despite this, Sediq relations with the Japanese were famously ambivalent, and a generation later, Sediq speakers—Dkedaya, Doda and Truku—were fighting and dying on Pacific battlefields for the Japanese empire. “We were never taught to hate the Japanese,” Takun Walis recalls.

Walis admits that despite growing up in a Dkedaya village and having grandparents who had perished in the aftermath of the Wushe Incident, he had very little idea of these events until he attended National Taiwan University. “No one wanted to discuss this,” he says.

The question of tribal identity lingered with the Sediq peoples, however, and was given added impetus when the Truku people gained recognition as the Taroko Nation in 2004, identifying them as a group distinct from the Atayal, but one that originally included the Doda and Dkedaya peoples as well. When they were recognized as Taroko—the pronunciation of the tribe’s name by the Japanese and the basis of the name of Taroko Gorge, one of Taiwan’s most famous natural attractions—some 21,000 people in Hualien reregistered their tribal identities as Taroko from the previous Atayal, according to Scott Simon. The Executive Yuan’s Council of Indigenous Peoples now uses the name Truku instead of Taroko.

Many Sediq speakers in Nantou County were unimpressed that their villages had been included in the Taroko Nation, however. “We strongly wanted to gain our own [Sediq] identity after this,” Doda Sediq Watan Diro says, but even this idea ran into opposition. Scott Simon says that the word sediq simply means person, and many Sediqs told him that therefore, logically, everyone would belong to a “Sediq” tribe.

Yet advocates prevailed and in October 2008 the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou granted Sediqs full recognition as Taiwan’s 14th aboriginal tribe. The Dkedaya and Doda Sediq groups live mostly in Renai Township and in Hualien County. In Hualien County, Sediqs number between 4,000 and 5,000, according to the central government.

Formal Recognition

This formal recognition has benefited tribespeople in many ways, according to Watan Diro, not the least of which is promoting tribal solidarity between Doda and Dkedaya Sediqs. He says it gives them a platform to engage with the other tribes as equals by allowing them to participate in inter-tribal educational, economic and cultural forums. As Sediqs, they also formed a cultural committee that worked with the makers of Seediq Bale to ensure the accuracy of the production and that their cultural history would not be exploited. Diro consulted on the movie, and Takun Walis also was given a script to read, although their responses to the project differed.

Walis says he was too emotionally overwhelmed to read the script. Diro is appreciative of the artistic merits of the work, and is even willing to grant the moviemakers a certain degree of latitude when it comes to dramatizing events. He says some of these are tolerable, such as depicting Mona Rudao as a hero in battles that actually occurred when the chief was a toddler. Other liberties the movie took with historical events, though, are likely to offend Sediqs, he says, and the director and the committee were sometimes at odds. For example, in the climactic scene, the mass suicides of the Dkedaya people are depicted as occurring by gunshot, when in fact people hanged themselves from trees in the vicinity. This fact was observed by the first Japanese soldiers to arrive in the area, who reported the trees so laden with bodies that they dipped close to the ground.

While the actual manner of the suicides might seem like taking a smaller liberty than showing the hero in battles in which he could never have actually participated, Watan Diro says that to the Sediq, it is tantamount to sacrilege. He explains that depicting the gun as an instrument of suicide is not only historically inaccurate, but also introduces a foreign, “polluting” element that the people had deliberately avoided. “The gun is a modern weapon, a Japanese weapon,” he asserts. “No Sediq would ever turn a gun on his own family.” He says he is unsure whether the filmmakers changed the ending or not.

While none of the Dkedaya Sediqs contacted mentioned any specific discrimination resulting from the participation of their ancestors in the Wushe Incident, it is also true that they, like all of Taiwan’s aboriginal population, continue to register lower educational levels, fewer job prospects and shorter lives than the Han majority.

Watan Diro expresses hope that the movie Seediq Bale will connect young people with the power of their heritage, and feels there is little risk of ethnic tensions erupting from it. “We Sediqs—Dkedaya, Doda and Truku—no longer live in the shadow of history,” he says.

Timothy Ferry is a writer based in Taipei.

Copyright © 2010 by Timothy Ferry