Hayashida Immigrant Village

Hayashida (林田) was the third and last of the government-run Japanese immigrant villages in the Huadong Valley, following Yoshino and Fengtian, laid out in 1914 on former sugar-company land near Fenglin. Settlers came mostly from Fukuoka and Kumamoto in Kyushu; by 1917 the village held around 177 households across three planned hamlets, Nakano (中野), Minamioka (南崗) and Kitabayashi (北林), with a separate Taiwan Village (台灣村) for Taiwanese labourers. Nakano formed the administrative core, site of the Hayashida Shinto Shrine, the police station, and the elementary school with its surviving teachers’ dormitory. The Japanese were repatriated after 1945 and the farmland passed to Hakka settlers, whose later tobacco barns still dot the area; the grid streets, a few wooden houses, and an earth-god stone remain among the present-day villages of Darong and Beilin.