An engineer with the common touch

Hatta’s former residence at the memorial park (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)

Colonial Japan’s Hatta Yoichi has found lasting respect and admiration in Taiwan.

On May 8 each year, a ceremony is held in memory of Hatta Yoichi (1886–1942) at the grave of the Japanese civil engineer in Tainan City. The service is held near the Wushantou Reservoir, part of the irrigation system designed by Hatta and built under his command in southern Taiwan’s Chianan Plain during Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). On that day in May during World War II, while on his way to the Philippines for an irrigation facility survey mission, the ship on which Hatta and his team members were traveling in the East China Sea sank after being hit by torpedoes fired by a US submarine. This year, among those who went to Wushantou to pay their respects to the architect of what was Asia’s largest and the world’s third largest waterworks at the time were Republic of China President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), former Japanese Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro, who led a delegation from his country, and Hatta family members including the architect’s grandson, Hatta Shuichi. They also celebrated the opening of a park honoring the great civil engineer. The establishment of the park was supervised by the Tourism Bureau’s Siraya National Scenic Area Administration under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications. The Siraya are the indigenous Austronesian people of the Chianan Plain, which is the most expansive plain in Taiwan and largely covers today’s Chiayi County and Tainan City. It also extends as far as Yunlin and Changhua counties to the north and Kaohsiung City to the south.

The Hatta memorial park features four renovated historical buildings including Hatta’s residence and three other Japanese-style houses that were originally built for personnel working on the Chianan waterworks construction project, which began in 1920. The new park cost about NT$129 million (US$4.4 million) to complete and involved research trips to Hatta’s hometown in central Japan and the use of traditional Japanese carpentry techniques to ensure the restoration work was authentic.

President Ma Ying-jeou, center right, Tainan City Mayor Lai Ching-te, second right, and Hatta Yoichi’s grandson Hatta Shuichi, center left, attend the opening ceremony of the Hatta Yoichi memorial park in May this year. (Photo by Central News Agency)

In a broader context, the establishment of the park marks a revaluation of a controversial period in Taiwan’s history. In his speech marking the opening of the park, President Ma noted that, despite the unfortunate and painful period of Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan, Japan’s contributions to the development of infrastructure throughout the island cannot be denied. “While Hatta worked in line with the imperial design of developing ‘an agricultural Taiwan and industrial Japan,’ his efforts still benefited local Taiwan people a lot,” says Yang Ming-feng (楊明風), chairman of the Chianan Irrigation Association, which is the current operator of the system that Hatta designed. The largest of 18 irrigation associations around Taiwan, Yang’s organization is located in an office building in downtown Tainan that was built during Japanese rule. Yang is also a board member representing the association in the Hatta Yoichi Memorial Foundation for Culture and Arts. The foundation was established in February this year to promote activities in the fields of culture, art, education and tourism as well as international exchanges among Taiwan, Japan and the international community.

Another event this year marking the 69th anniversary of Hatta’s death was the release of a Mandarin version of the Japanese comic book Hatta Yoichi, which was jointly published by Nan I Book Enterprise Co. Ltd. and Shogakukan Inc., two major publishing houses in Taiwan and Japan respectively. “In the face of colonial rule, he ignored the distinctions of class, title, ethnicity or race, showing a broad-mindedness rare among members of the ruling class,” notes the postscript to the comic book written by Su Jyun-hsyong (蘇俊雄), president of the Hatta foundation and a former grand justice. Su cites the example of the monument created in 1930 when construction of the Chianan waterworks was completed. Hatta gave the order to erect the monument for the more than 130 workers or workers’ family members involved in the construction project who were killed by accidents or disease. “The monument had the names of all of the victims on it and didn’t put the Japanese names before local ones,” Su notes.

Hatta, top left in white shirt, supervises the dam construction project in 1923. (Photo Courtesy of Chianan Irrigation Association)

Integrity, Kindness, Diligence

A Japanese animated film about Hatta released in November 2009 is another of the efforts to interest younger generations of Taiwanese in this period of local history. President Ma attended the premiere of the film, entitled Pattenrai, which means “Hatta’s here” in Taiwanese. The story develops an image of a competent, determined civil engineer with the personal qualities of integrity, kindheartedness and diligence, so that the cry of “Pattenrai” moves from a fearful shout by local Taiwanese who see Hatta arrive by car at the beginning of the film to an exclamation of admiration by the end.

Hatta came to Taiwan in 1910 after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University, today’s University of Tokyo, to work for the civil engineering department of the Taiwan Governor’s Office. Before he started carrying out the survey of the Chianan Plain in 1918, Hatta had designed and built several smaller-scale waterworks including the irrigation network of today’s Taoyuan region in northern Taiwan. Major parts of the far more challenging Chianan project include the Wushantou Reservoir and a three-kilometer tunnel drilled through Tainan’s Mt. Wushan to carry water from the Zengwen River to the reservoir, as well as some 16,000 kilometers of irrigation and drainage channels stretching over 150,000 hectares of farmland. Located upstream on the Guantian River, the dam is 1,273 meters long, 56 meters high, 303 meters wide at the bottom and nine meters wide at the top. The reservoir holds 150 million cubic meters of water. A dam of such a scale was unprecedented in Asia and required techniques that had few precursors anywhere in the world. One approach that Hatta adopted to make the massive mission more feasible was the introduction of the most advanced heavy machinery available at the time from the United States and Germany, using a considerable portion of the total budget. “Such equipment also sped up the construction process and thus could bring about greater rice harvests as early as possible,” Yang Ming-feng says.

Hatta, seventh left in front row, is photographed with his dam construction team in 1929. (Photo Courtesy of Chianan Irrigation Association)

In June 1922, shortly after Hatta came back from a trip abroad to learn more about alternative reservoir building practices, however, a gas leak caused a large explosion at a tunnel drilling site, causing more than 50 deaths and halting construction for some time. Then an even greater disaster followed that would delay the project longer. In September 1923, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale hit the Kanto Plain in Japan, including the capital city Tokyo, killing more than 100,000 people. As the Taiwan Governor’s Office had to send funds for relief and reconstruction to the Japanese mainland, a budget crisis led to another suspension of the Chianan waterworks project. Work did not resume on the project until 1924, by which time the Japanese government had carried out sufficient reconstruction work for victims of the Kanto quake and found new funds for its colonized island.

Tseng Shu-cheng (曾旭正), a professor in the Graduate Institute of Architecture at Tainan National University of the Arts, points out that the Hatta dam was largely made of local stone and earth with little use of steel or cement. “In view of today’s concepts of sustainable development,” Tseng says, “that’s a very advanced approach.” For the professor, Hatta’s signature achievement is actually three-fold, including the reservoir, network of irrigation channels and establishment of a system to allot water from the dam under a three-year rotation scheme. The reservoir’s capacity is insufficient for the total area to be irrigated at the same time so the land was divided into three sections, with each section taking turns to receive enough water to grow rice once every three years, then switching to growing sugar cane, potatoes or other crops during the two years without a steady water supply. “Hatta didn’t want to see the limited water resources enjoyed by farmers in one specific area only, so he made sure the resources could be shared by more people through water management,” Tseng says. “In this we can see his humanitarian spirit.”

A present-day view of the Hatta dam (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)

Hatta’s caring approach was also shown in his personnel management. “He built houses for workers and their families to live together,” Yang notes, “and to the housing area he introduced leisure facilities such as tennis courts and clubs.” In fact, as other facilities for everyday life such as schools and hospitals were established in the residential area, a new town sprang up at the present-day location of the newly opened Hatta memorial park. Hatta again displayed consideration for his workers following budget cuts after the Kanto quake, when he decided to lay off the more knowledgeable and skilled personnel. His reasoning was that these people were more likely to find new jobs, while less-skilled workers might have a harder time in the same situation, causing distress to their families.

Tseng notes the changes wrought by the irrigation system. In the hilly land in central and northern Taiwan, mountain creeks offer sufficient water for growing rice, but in the past, farmers of the Chianan Plain for the most part grew other crops due to an unstable water supply that largely relied on rainfall. “That’s why people used to say ‘northern rice and southern sugar,’” Tseng says. “The completion of the Wushantou hydraulic system in 1930 radically changed that situation and during the later period of Japanese rule, Taiwan became a rice exporter and saw great agricultural progress that laid the foundation for Taiwan’s move toward the export processing model of economic development.”

Hatta is pictured with his wife one month before the ship on which he was traveling sank in the East China Sea in 1942. (Photo Courtesy of Chianan Irrigation Association)

World Heritage

The professor says that the Wushantou hydraulic system, noteworthy for both its engineering and its great influence on Taiwan’s agriculture and economy, has the potential to be listed among the world heritage sites of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The project started in 1972 when UNESCO’s General Conference adopted the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage in Paris. Tseng is the spokesperson of an alliance formed in 2009 by scholars and groups including irrigation associations and community universities that is working to add the Wushantou hydraulic system to the UNESCO world heritage list. Since Taiwan is not a UN member, and thus is not entitled to submit an application, Tseng says that the alliance hopes to cooperate with like-minded groups in Japan to further the bid. Currently, a campaign is underway in Taiwan to collect signatures for a petition to support the call for Wushantou to be named a world heritage site. As of mid-May this year, more than 78,000 people had signed the petition. “On the one hand, this campaign is a learning process for Taiwanese people to recognize the significance of one of their country’s major resources,” Tseng says. “On the other hand, it can show our determination to our Japanese friends, who might then be persuaded to help our cause.”

Yang Ming-feng says that, although Hatta came from a colonial government, he deserves the respect of people in Taiwan as the creator of a project that helped all people, regardless of their nationality. In addition to maintaining the restored houses at the Hatta memorial park, a job that falls to the Chianan Irrigation Association, Yang hopes to see more old Japanese houses restored in the park to create a solid base for further Taiwan-Japan exchanges. Among other things, as President Ma mentioned in his opening remarks for the memorial park, Kanazawa High School from Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture, Hatta’s birthplace, plans to make a visit to the park a focus of its students’ graduation trips. And since the signing of a youth working-holiday agreement between Taiwan and Japan in 2009, the Hatta memorial park area could become a major destination for Japanese students on a working holiday, as they could serve as guides. Yang also points to the potential of the site for cultural creative businesses. “Television dramas and movies could be filmed here,” he says. From a great dam to drama, the Hatta story will continue to be a thrilling story to tell for years to come.

Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com