Toyota Immigration Village (Tobacco House) Introduction
Fengtian, a name filled with cultural flavor. Traveling along Provincial Highway 9, at 224 kilometers, you will find three cement pillars on the left side (heading east), with the middle one marked as Fengtian. The pillars are adorned with windmills and herons, marking the location of Fengtian. During the Japanese colonial period, the Taiwan Governor-General's Office implemented a large-scale "immigration policy" in the Hualien and eastern regions, establishing several sizable immigrant villages such as Yoshino, Fengtian, Lintian, Ruifang, and Lukang. These Japanese immigrants predominantly came from rural areas in Japan, setting up "Yamato ethnic model villages" in eastern Taiwan, greatly influencing the cultural development of Taiwan during the Japanese rule. The Fengtian immigrant village is one of the better-preserved sites today. In the second year of the Taisho era, Japanese introduced American yellow tobacco for the first time, planting it in Yoshino immigrant village, which gradually expanded to Fengtian immigrant village. In the early years, one could gauge a household's wealth by the number of "tobacco towers" they had. Although tobacco has declined in recent years, the Hiroshima-style and Osaka-style tobacco towers still remain, serving as a testament to the past tobacco era and providing favorable footnotes for the immigrant industry during the Japanese colonial period. After Taiwan's retrocession, most residents of the immigrant villages were repatriated to Japan. For over 60 years, these Japanese immigrant villages seemed to fade away in the river of time, leaving behind some old buildings and artifacts that witness traces of those decades ago. In recent years, the attention and focus from local cultural and historical workers and residents have gradually brought this long-silent history back to public awareness.
