CHAPTER VI.
KOREAN WOMEN—(continued).
Slight as is the visible part played by woman in Korea, yet there are an almost endless number of facts concerning her which are either significant or in themselves interesting. To me at least, woman, and the conditions of her life, together form the most interesting branch of the study of Korea. And even to those who take no deep interest in burning social questions, and whose interest in far-away lands scarcely exceeds an intelligent curiosity, any facts about Korean women must be especially interesting, I fancy, because those facts are less generally known, less easily known than almost any other facts connected with this wonderful peninsula, and its wonderful people. So I do not hesitate to devote another of my very limited number of chapters to the women of Korea.
Cosmetics are not, it is gratifying to say, a product of our Western civilization. They are greatly used all over the Orient. But in two particulars there is less to be said against the face-painting of Eastern women than there is to be said against the face-painting of the women of the West. In Asia, hair-oil, rouge, powder, kohl for the eyes and eyebrows, and brilliant pigments for the lips, are put on frankly, and are as avowedly, and as sincerely, a seemly and decent adornment, and as much an item of being “dressed up,” as is a silken petticoat or a jewelled necklet. Ladies of Asia “make up” more brazenly than the ladies of Europe, and their ugly, painted imitation is still less like the loveliness of nature than is the painted ugliness of ourselves when we do not feel that we have sufficient beauty of face to leave it unadorned. But the Eastern woman who “makes up” her face has no thought of deceiving anyone, or of obtaining masculine admiration or feminine envy under false pretences. Her painting is as much a matter of convention as is the Chinaman’s wearing of his queue; and she lays on the thick layers of brilliant red and ghastly white as devoutly and as dutifully as she says her prayers. The other good word I have to say for the cosmetics of the Orient is this—they are infinitely less harmful than the cosmetics we are wont to use in Europe. I know that. For, on the stage I have tried both very thoroughly.
A well-to-do Korean woman usually has a very interesting collection of hair-pins. They are long, heavily ornamented, made of silver, of gold, or of copper; more usually of silver. Some of them are very beautiful, and some that I have seen reminded me very much of the long silver pins that are thrust through the braids of Italian peasant women.
The well-to-do women, especially in the capital, now very generally wear European under-clothing. They invariably wear a pouch which is fastened by cords to their girdle. This is their pocket, the only pocket they have, except their sleeves, and in it they carry a tiger’s claw for luck, a small cushion of sachet, or a bottle of thick, rich perfume, some of their favourite pieces of jewellery, scissors usually, or a knife, two or three of their most frequently used toilet implements, and almost invariably a small Korean chess-board and chess-men. The board and the pieces are often made of silver or even of gold. Chess is, perhaps, the most popular of all Korea’s many games, and the Korean women of the leisure class play it incessantly. The pocket also contains, more likely than not, the official book of female politeness; a book which every Korean lady studies assiduously. But whatever this pocket contains or does not contain, it must by no means be without several charms, charms for good luck, charms for health, charms for wealth, and for any or every other good desirable under the Korean sun. Of its charms the most valuable is the tiger’s claw. Mr. Griffis says, “Nor can the hardy mountaineer put into the hand of his bride a more eloquent proof of his valour than one of those weapons of a man-eater. It means even more than the edelweiss of other mountain lands.” The tiger is probably the most dreaded foe of the Koreans. They fear it more than they fear China; hate it more than they hate Japan. The Chinese have a saying which so vividly pictures the tiger-Korean situation that I must quote it, though it has, I believe, already been quoted by every other European and the majority of Orientals who have ever written on Korea. It is this: “The Korean spends one half of the year hunting the tiger, and the other half in being hunted by him.”
The hands of a Korean lady are always exquisitely kept, and usually loaded with rings, often with rings of very great value.
Among some classes of Korean women the dressing of their hair is the most important item of their toilet, and one skilled in ways Korean, and in signs of Korean rank, can very readily determine, from a glance at her coiffure, who and what a Korean woman is. The ladies of the court wear their hair in different prescribed ways. The geisha girls have an artistic fashion of their own, and a Korean woman servant, one part of whose duty is to fetch and to carry, makes out of the braids of her own hair an enormous cushion upon which she can carry with the greatest security a huge bundle, or a vast dish of food.
The men of no other race are so amply dowered with hats as are the men of Korea. Probably the women of no other civilized country are so badly off for head-gear as are the women of Chosön, and this is not, though we might easily fancy it to be, because those women are not supposed to walk or ride abroad. For innumerable years Korea has taken her fashions from China, changing them with the change of dynasty at Pekin. But for five hundred years the Koreans have failed to change the fashion of their hats, and they remain true to the style of head-gear which was in vogue when the present Korean dynasty came into power. When the present fashion in hats was imported from Pekin, just about five hundred years ago, the Koreans neglected to learn, or were unable to learn, what the women of China were wearing on their heads, or else the women of China were going bare-headed. The result was that Korean women, having discarded their previous head coverings, and receiving no authority from Pekin for the fashion of new ones, became hatless, and have been hatless ever since. The only hat the Korean women wear now is the folded dress which I have described before. There is indeed a jaunty, little embroidered cap not unlike a modified Turkish fez, or the gloriouscapoteof a Frenchvivandière, which is supposed to be at the disposal of any Korean woman who cares to assume it, but it has been adopted by the geisha girls, and so, of course, discarded by Korean ladies. Korean women used to wear a huge hat not unlike a small, flat, Chinese parasol. It was perched well up on and well to the back of their heads, and was surrounded by a rather fascinating silk fringe, through which they could see and be seen—a fringe that was, perhaps, as becoming to them as our white spotted veils are to us.
A few words here about divorce in Korea, for divorce is always a matter of more importance to a woman than to her husband. This is so in every country, because as yet in every country woman is more confined to her home, more dependent upon her home, and less free to go abroad at all seasons and under all circumstances than man is, and therefore less able to escape the daily torment of married unhappiness. In the United States, and in most European countries whose laws I have at all studied, the divorce laws are very much more in favour of woman than of man. In Korea the direct opposite is true. There is little or nothing for which a Korean woman can obtain a divorce, and there is little or nothing for which a Korean man cannot. Whether it is more to the credit of Korean woman or to the credit of Korean man far be it for me to say; but it is a very rare occurrence for a Korean husband to put aside his wife. The sanctity of the home circle, the inviolate maintenance of that home circle is more than a religion, more than an instinct with nine-tenths of the people of Asia. Their idea of a home circle may be more elastic than ours, but, as a rule, they abide by it almost with the courage of martyrs. The women must, and the men do. In one respect the divorce laws of Korea are more radical than the divorce laws of the West. Incompatibility of temper justifies divorce in Korea, and is the cause of most Korean divorces. Truly nothing could be more sensible, more humane—provided one has no religious scruples—for even children lose more than they gain by living in an unhappy home. Incompatibility of temper may not be a sin, but it is the one difficulty in the path of married happiness, in Asia or in Europe, which can never be smoothed away. It is insurmountable, nor can you go around it. It seems to me that the only decent thing to do when you come upon it, again provided your conscience will let you, is to turn round and go back. A harsh word, a quick gesture, and many things that are many times worse can be forgiven readily enough, and almost forgotten, by people who have the common justice to judge not lest they be judged. But incompatibility of temper, that strange something which makes it impossible for me to teach my pet cat to eat or drink with my pet dog, ah! that is the marital thorn, the marriage plague, “past cure, past help, past hope.” And I congratulate the law makers of Korea for recognizing it for what it is, and dealing with it as it should be dealt with. To be sure, if a Korean man and wife fail to get along, perpetually fail, the woman has no direct voice in the matter; but if she and her husband agree together to untie the mistakenly-tied knot, he can very easily do so. And even in Korea a woman of average wit does not probably find it too difficult a task to make herself so very disagreeable that the husband may be brought to propose the separation which she secretly desires.
But where the Korean law seems to me very inconsistent is in not punishing, when the marriage is a failure, the geomancer who selected the wedding day. The method of this sage is so simple that it ought to be infallible. He adds the age of the bride to the age of the groom, and after determining which star rules the destiny of their united ages, he decrees that the wedding shall take place upon the day sacred to that star. How a day so chosen can ever fail to be auspicious, and to be the beginning of many days of uninterrupted happiness it is hard for a simple Western mind to understand. To do the geomancer justice, it is perhaps because of his occult wisdom that divorce plays so minor a part in Korean life.
One Korean law concerning women seems to me uniquely cruel. A woman may not die in the arms of a man, nor may a woman hold in her arms a man who is dying. Husbands and wives love each other sometimes—even in Korea. Mothers love their sons, the wide world over, and sons their mothers. Korean fathers yearn over their daughters, and are loved tenderly by those daughters in return. What a barbarous law! how infamous; how unworthy of the East or of the West! what a reflection upon humanity; what a stain upon Korea! That inferiority of sex (sex—that unexplained accident of our physical existence), inferiority, real or imagined, should separate man from wife, father from daughter, son from mother, even by a hair’s breadth, at the moment when Death, the merciless, the relentless, pronounces the great, and perhaps eternal separation!
Though a Korean woman nominally counts for nothing in the ruling of her own household, and, as far as the workings of the State go, does not exist, she is invariably treated with the manner of respect; she is always addressed in what is called “honorific language;” to her the phraseology is used which is used to superiors, people of age, or of literary eminence. A Korean nobleman will step aside to let a Korean peasant woman pass him on the street. The rooms of a Korean woman are as sacred to her as a shrine is to its image. Indeed, the rooms of his wife or of his mother are the sanctuary of any Korean man who breaks the law. Unless for treason or for one other crime, he cannot be forced to leave those rooms, and so long as he remains under the protection of his wife, and his wife’s apartments, he is secure from the officers of the law, and from the penalties of his own misdemeanours.
It is often said that the men of the East regard women not only as their inferiors, but as burdens, as superfluous, useless, and despicable. This is a mistake, as large a mistake in speaking of Koreans as of any other Oriental race. The potence of sex, the impotence of either sex alone, is the great underlying thought of all Eastern philosophy, I had almost said, of all Oriental ethics. Which of the great Eastern religions ignores it, or passes it by lightly? Study the symbols in the old caves of India: read Confucius. Every educated Oriental believes that without women life would not only be impossible but worthless. They regard her sphere of usefulness as important as their own. An Oriental mother is almost an Oriental deity. This is as true in Korea as in China, in Japan, in Persia, in Hindostan, and in Burmah. The thinkers of Asia differ from us in what they regard as the most appropriate and the most essential spheres of women’s usefulness, but they never ignore, nor do I think they underrate, the importance of woman’s work. Mr. Griffis, who is not over partial to the Koreans (perhaps if he had ever lived among them he might have liked them better), himself says:—
“With the ethics of the Chinese came their philosophy, which is based on the dual system of the universe, and of which in Korean,yum-yang(positive and negative, active and passive, or male and female) is the expression. All things in heaven, earth, and man are the result of the interaction of theyum(male or active principle), and theyang(female or passive principle). Even the metals and minerals in the earth are believed to be produced through theyum-yang, and to grow like plants or animals.”
Even so clear, so cool, so sympathetic, so cultured, and best of all, so unbigoted an observer, a thinker, and a writer as Percival Lowell, seems to me to have blundered a little in his summing up of the position of woman in the East. He says:—
“The lower man’s place in the scale of nations, the lower, relatively to his own, has always been that of woman. Woman, being physically less strong, naturally suffers where physical strength is made the basis of esteem. But as men have advanced in civilization, gradually a chivalrous regard has been paid the weaker, but fairer sex. Now, though the countries of the Far East have had their age of feudalism, in a general parallelism to those of the West, loyalty took the place of chivalry as one of its attendant feelings. At the point where woman elsewhere made herdébutupon the social stage, here she failed to appear; and she has not done so since. The history of these races has been a history of man apart from any help from woman. To all social intents and purposes, woman has remained as she was when she followed as a slave in her Lord’s wanderings. She is better fed now, better clothed, cleaner and more comfortable than she was; but, relatively to the position of the people, no higher. She counts for nothing in the life of the race at the present time, as she has counted for nothing in it from the beginning.”
That the history of the races of the Far East has been a history of man apart from any help of woman, I cannot understand Mr. Lowell’s saying. He is evidently a man of very wide education, and he has lived in the Far East. Undoubtedly he has read the history of the Far East, and I cannot imagine the author of “Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm,” reading anything unintelligently. “That woman counts for nothing in the life of the race at the present time, as she has counted as nothing in it from the beginning!” Ah! yes, Mr. Lowell. She counts for a great deal. The tally of her influence may not be kept in the market-place, nor her power blazoned on the house-tops, but influence and power are there. She counts for a hundred things, and will count in every part of the globe, civilized or uncivilized, until Nature adopts a very differentmodus operandifrom her present one. And in Korea, in China and Japan, woman counts above all for motherhood, and for the perpetuation of the race. And that she so counts must give her really great power among any race of men whose one eradicable religion is the worship of their ancestors, whose universal and insatiable ambition is to beget sons who may in turn worship them, and secure them a prosperous and a happy eternity.
There is much, very much that I deplore in the condition of woman in Korea. But once in a while woman gets the whip hand, and once in a very great while she has the wit to use it—and the nerve—even in Korea.
If it must be a canon of European literary good form to say very little, and to say it gingerly about Oriental polygamy, it has been a more than general custom among European writers to say nothing, nothing at least of any significance about the large class of Oriental women who stand outside the pale even of polygamy. There are some things that I think ought to be said about them; said now, when we are so very earnestly trying to understand the East, and, I hope, honestly striving to help the East. These things would come with more convention I know from the pen of a man, but I think they would come more appropriately from the pen of a woman, and I take upon myself the saying of them, in so far as I am able. I feel impelled to explain, as well as I can, the exact social position, and the exact personally mental attitude of the yoshiwara women of Japan, the flower girls of China, and the geisha girls of Korea. These three are sisters. They are cousins, more or less close of kin, to the nautch girls of India, and the posture girls of Burmah and of Siam. But these three were born of one father, and of one mother, and are the result of one bringing up. What shall I call them? I have no wish to use a harsh word that would offend select European ears, nor will I use a harsh word that would wrong and mis-describe them. I might almost call them the understudies of the happier women of the East; for in Asia’s social life they take the parts which ought, perhaps, to be played by the harem-hidden wives and mothers of the Orient. Those women, whose profession is publicity, are an important part of the social structure of every Asiatic race I have known, except only the Parsi race. To ignore their existence, when travelling through Asia in person, or with pen, is stupid. To slink by the strong position that they hold in the East, the big significance of their firm placement in the East, and the several lessons they will not fail to teach us, if we do not fear to learn, is prudish. To pass them by with a cry of horror, and to condemn them as being what they are not, is un-Christian and unjust.
For the men that mocked His agony and spat upon Him, Jesus claimed forgiveness, because “they knew not what they did.” And certainly the professionally unfortunate women of the East have as little consciousness of degradation and of sin as they have of shame. There are many reasons why this is so, and I will try to state them. I am only less sorry for the homeless, nameless women of Asia, than I am for the homeless, nameless women of Europe. Perhaps this is the best place for me to say that I am making no plea for the profession of which I am writing. For the women who through folly, through ignorance, or who beneath the lash of that hardest of all task-masters, circumstance, follow this nameless profession, I could easily find it in my heart to plead, and to plead, and to plead; but not now nor here. What I wish to do now is to write frankly, freely, and truthfully of the women who make the seclusion and the sanctity of gentlewomen possible in the Far East.
After all’s said and done, the social scales must balance or break, weight them as you will. And as the women of the Korean gentry are more secluded than those of any other Oriental gentry, so are the geisha girls of Chosön more interesting, more fascinating even than the yoshiwara women of Japan, and infinitely more so than the flower girls of China. Men living in the Far East, superior as they find the society of men to the society of men and women, tire of the perpetual society of men, and long to let down its intellectual average a bit by the introduction into it of women. Now the men of the East cannot possibly, from their point of view, bring their wives and daughters out from the safe shelter of home seclusion. But still they long for the mental, not to speak of the moral relaxation of woman’s companionship, and so in the East a class of women has sprung up which is only very slightly analogous to the class of Western women from whom respectable Western women draw their skirts aside as they pass them in the Western streets.
Women seem to be an indispensable element of society after all. Social enjoyment without them is more or less a failure, at least in any very prolonged form. And in those countries where wives and mothers must veil their faces, a class has sprung into existence—a class whose exact social position is almost, if not quite, outside the pale of modern European comprehension.
The geisha of Korea, like the yoshiwara women of Japan, are sweetly pretty, soft-voiced, and charmingly mannered. And, like their sisters of Japan, they seem almost happy and quite dignified. Perhaps indeed, they feel that they fulfil a national want—perform a national duty.
Companionship is the first and the chief thing required by an Oriental man from the women he pays to share some of the hours that he spends away from home. If the Hindoo, or Chinaman, or the Japanese, or the Korean man be poor, he has no leisure hours, and certainly cannot afford the illicit companionship which comes dear, and becomes dearer in the long run, all the world over. If he be well-to-do, the chances are that he has a bungalow or yamun running over with wives. Therefore, it is not for a common bestial satisfaction, but altogether for natural human companionship, that the men of the Far East so largely employ and so generously pay those Eastern women who have broken through the closed curtains and out of the sure safety of Oriental home-life, into the turmoil and the promiscuousness of society. Here, I must emphatically say, and it should be most emphatically remembered by anyone who is trying to understand the East: the nameless women of the East sin, but sin is neither their sole nor their chief occupation. To please, to amuse, to understand, and to companion men, mentally and socially, is their chief duty, their chief occupation, and their most earnest study. Sin follows, as sin has the grievous habit of following wherever people are human. But sin is neither the beginning nor the end, and I who can see no difference between a Korean wife and a Korean concubine, can see little or none between a Korean concubine and a Korean geisha. I am speaking of their morals, of course. The geisha girl is, as a rule, rather better educated than the concubine, better educated, quite possibly, than the wife; for the geisha must make her way, and hold any position she gains, solely by personal talent, personal attractiveness, and personal attainments. Not for her to lay at the man’s feet a son who may worship him into the most desirable corner of the Korean heaven; only for her to please him while she is with him, to touch for him odd instruments and sing to them soft, weird songs, to shake the soft perfume of her hair across his cheek and the perfume of the flowers she wears upon the bowl of food, or of fish, or fruit she humbly places before him; only for her to laugh at his humour, flat howsoever it may be; only for her to applaud his ambitions, urge on his hopes, charm away his fears; only for her to please; never for her, save by accident, to be pleased. And that is the state of their sad fate in Europe, in Asia, in America, or in Africa: the women who give an everlasting all for a momentary nothing. Feminine unchastity is less degrading in the East than in the West, and the unfortunate women of the East are far less degraded than the unfortunate women of the West. There are three reasons why this is so. In the Orient no woman is born to immorality. In the Orient professional unchastity is not considered altogether immoral. And immorality is not the only accomplishment necessary for the professional success of an Asiatic unfortunate.
In the Orient no woman is born to immorality. The ranks of the immoral profession are recruited from homes and from family circles that are quite up to the Asiatic average, and an immoral method of life is usually adopted by an Eastern girl not from impulse, not from caprice, but from a conviction that it is the surest and the most sensible way for her to earn her living, and assist in earning the living of her family. Her parents, in all probability, share this conviction with her, and nine times out of ten she makes herdébutin the profession of sin after the elders of her family have consulted earnestly together, and sifted, as best they can, the probabilities and the possibilities of her future. So she starts into her sad pilgrimage from a clean home, from clean associations, and her instincts and herself are clean and normal. She adopts sin gravely and as a business; nor does it ever occur to her to regard it as a self-indulgence; rather is it a penance, or an act of filial self-sacrifice.
In the East the life of a young girl is seldom wrecked by the misfortune which overtakes so many of our own girls. The social arrangements in the East prevent that, prevent it very effectually. When an Eastern girl takes upon herself a long martyrdom of public service she is at least of normal mind and whole of heart. Her nature, mental and moral, however it may be debased by her future life, is as yet unvitiated by any accumulation of ancestral wrong-doing. She may adopt sin for reasons that seem good and sufficient to herself and her parents, but she has no appetite for sin, no appetite inherited from her mother at least, so she has a fairer start than have the majority of unfortunate women in the Occident.
In the Orient professional unchastity is not considered altogether immoral. “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This may not be altogether true, but certainly there is a good deal of truth in it. The unfortunate women of the East have vastly more self-respect than have the unfortunate women of the West. They are not despised, and therefore they do not despise themselves; nor are they driven by the merciless scourges of public opinion to lower and coarser methods of life than those unavoidably entailed by the profession they follow. Their profession is not considered an honourable, an elevating, nor an enviable one; but it is considered, by the people among whom they live, as a useful and necessary and, within certain loose limits, an honest one. This makes it possible for them to lead lives of comparative respectability, and to enjoy frankly, fearlessly, and purely some of the best things of life. The flowers that grow about their houses, and the wonderful skies that canopy their countries, convey to them no word of reproach. They gather the blossoms as innocently, and they smile back at the smiling heavens as unashamedly as does any maiden in the East.
If one gives a dog a sufficiently bad name it becomes almost righteous to hang him. The peoples of the Orient spare their unfortunate women unnecessary contumely. And this is the second reason why those women are better, less deplorable, individually and collectively, than are such women in Europe or America. This seems to me another instance of Asiatic justice and good sense. Why such women, and such women alone, should be blamed for an existing state of general immorality I cannot imagine. They are not responsible for it, though, of course, they help to perpetuate it. They take to life’s sad market-place wares for which they know there is a demand. They supply the demand; but they do not create it.
Immorality is not the only accomplishment necessary for the professional success of an Asiatic unfortunate. As I have said, companionship is the chief return an Eastern man expects and exacts for the coin that he throws into the lap of a light woman. The loose women of the East must be educated, and that they are educated makes it possible for them to spend many hours of each day in wholesome, refining occupations—occupations which are closed to the great mass of European unfortunates.
To recapitulate, the women of whom I am writing are of a better grade than are such women in the West, because in the East those women come from respectable homes and have memories of innocent and happy childhoods. Secondly, because they are so regarded in the East that they need not altogether part with self-respect; and lastly, because education and refinement are not only possible to them, but necessary to them, and because the majority of their professional hours are passed in conversation or with music, and are altogether free from coarseness.
I have spoken of these women as being out of the pale of matrimony. This is true, I believe, in China and in Korea, and in most other Oriental countries; but it is not at all true in Japan. It used to be in Japan an ordinary occurrence, and even now it is not, I think, unusual for a girl to sell herself for a stated period of time into the horrible slavery of a tea-house, or become for some definite number of years the mistress of a well-to-do man. This is often done to earn enough money to pay some debt of family honour, to redeem the pledged word of a father or of a brother. The girl who does it is considered anything and everything rather than a bad woman. She returns to her native village, or to her father’s house, when the time of her servitude has expired, and she is received with every possible sign of honourable welcome, and is pointed out then and thereafter as an example of daughterly perfection, and of virtuous womanhood. She marries as readily and as well as any of her girl friends, and her past is not regarded as to her detriment either by her husband or his family. This practice is more common among the poor than among the rich. But there are women of very high position in Japan who have had this terrible experience, and who have survived it, mentally and morally.
There is, of course, in Japan a large number of women who adopt immorality when they are very young, and who never put it aside. They are called yoshiwara women. In the old times they lived apart, not only in quarters of the town set aside for them, but in quarters that were enwalled, and through the gateways of which they could not pass without permission—permission that was not too readily granted. Even now there are streets set apart in almost every Oriental city—set apart for the occupancy of unfortunate women. The roads and the byways of Japan are sprinkled with tea-houses, and in almost every tea-house there are two or more yoshiwara women. These tea-houses are models of cleanliness, are usually pretty in situation, and always artistically furnished. The tea, cakes, and sweets sold in them are almost invariably delicious. The girls who are supposed to be the chief attraction of the tea-houses are rather brazen as a rule, far more so than the flower-girls of China, or the geisha girls of Korea, but it is a very butterfly sort of brazenness. Their manners are so pretty, their movements so bird-like, and their voices so tinkling and silvery, that it seems rather unfair to criticize them for being somewhat over-emphatic in what they say and do, and in how they say and do it.
I remember one warm afternoon in Kobe, I was in my jinrickshaw and several miles from home. I was tired, very thirsty, and my four-year-old boy, who was with me, assured me that he could not live much longer unless he had something to eat. I stopped at a tea-house—a pretty, carved, lantern-hung place that was perched on the hillside, not very far from the marvellous waterfall. I had not been very long in Japan, and had no idea that I was making a social blunder, but I noticed that my jinrickshaw coolie looked disturbed and dubious. Two Japanese girls sat on the verandah; one was smoking a long silver pipe, and the other was picking whispered music from a diminutive white guitar. One girl wore a kimono of pale green crêpe, brocaded with pink apple-blossoms; the other girl’s kimono was of dark, bright blue, but it was almost covered with huge yellow roses. Both girls wore the ordinary Japanese sash, had their hair elaborately dressed, and were rather loaded with jewellery. Through the openings of their kimonos peeped the edges of sundry other garments, all of crêpe or of silk, and all brilliantly coloured. They laughed and nodded as I came up the steps, and when I said that my boy and I were hungry and thirsty, one of them rose and led me into the house. We passed through a fair-sized room in which half a dozen European men, one of whom I happened to know, and as many Japanese girls were feasting rather merrily. The girls looked at me with considerable good-natured amusement; the European men looked at me in most considerable surprise. Baby and I were taken into a dainty little room which really was not big enough for more than two, and there were given quite a delightful luncheon. The girl who had showed us in waited upon us gravely and most attentively, and with admirable patience, for we were both hungry, very hungry, and thirsty, very thirsty. I found out afterwards that it was the first time she had poured afternoon tea for one of her own sex, and that I had made a most unfortunate mistake in going into the tea-house at all. But the girl who served us treated me and herself with perfect respect.
Respectable Japanese women wear the quietest of colours, in public at least. Bright flowers, glittering jewellery, and gaudy garments are the avowed livery of the yoshiwara women. They are pretty as a rule—these women—prettier even than the run of Japanese women; for in Japan personal beauty is considered one of the indispensable attributes of women who would lead a life of remunerative idleness.
The flower-girls of China are in most ways more to be pitied than the yoshiwara women of Japan. They are not as a rule so well educated, nor so comfortably housed, and though treated with a good deal of allowance, and collectively taken, as a matter of course, their position is neither so assured, nor the circumstances of their lives so endurable as are those of the Japanese girls. The breaking of the seventh commandment may be as common in China as it is in Korea or Japan, but it is not so lightly regarded, and the flower-girls are almost without exception the children of extreme poverty. And a Chinese woman who has once lived in a house of ill-fame can never go back to even apparent respectability. This is not so in the Straits Settlements, where there are very many Chinamen and very few Chinese women. In Singapore and in Penang Chinese girls who have been sent from China for immoral purposes very frequently marry well, and pass the rest of their lives in security and comfort. But in China I fancy that this never happens.
The Chinaman is the most domesticated of the men of the East, and the least fond of general society. He does not go to the houses of the flower-girls for society, for companionship, not at least in any quiet and unobjectionable sense, nor so commonly as do Korean and Japanese men. The Chinese flower-girl, except the very lowest type, is taught to sing, to play on several instruments, to heat wine and to spice it, to prepare delicacies and table dainties, and to serve a feast. She is taught to keep herself as good-looking from a Chinese standpoint as possible. But this is usually the list of her accomplishments, the limit of her education, and she is vastly ignorant compared to the women who dwell in the house of the man who patronizes her. Many of these Chinese women live outside the gates of Chinese cities. Thousands of them live in little boats that are called “flower-boats” and off of which they seldom go. The “flower-boats” of Canton are a most distinctive feature of that most distinctly quaint place. Shortly before the declaration of war between China and Japan, the following telegram was sent from Hong Kong:—
“A terrible fire has occurred on the Canton river among the flower-boats which crowd the surface and form the permanent dwelling of a large number of the population. Hundreds of the flower-boats were destroyed, and fully one thousand natives must have perished.
“The boats were moored stem and stern in rows, and the flames spread with such rapidity that many of the craft were fully alight and their occupants overcome before they could cut the boats from their moorings and push them out into the open water.”
As if poor China were not in trouble enough just then, with a terrible plague still in rather full swing, and with war and with rumours of war, but must needs go and set herself on fire!
I don’t in the least doubt that there was a terrible fire on the Canton river, and that over a thousand human creatures perished in the flames. Such a catastrophe is by no means unprecedented in China, and most especially in Canton. But I do doubt that the fire broke out among the flower-boats. In the first place the flower-boats do not crowd the surface of the Canton river. In the second place they do not form the permanent dwelling of a large number of the population. I think that the sender of the dispatch, or one of the operators through whose hands it passed, must have confused flower-boats, sampans and Chinese cargo-boats.
The flower-boats are not in a crowded part of the river. They are moored quite by themselves at the wide mouth of the river and some little distance from the city. They are together, but not painfully near. No families dwell upon them. They are occupied solely by the flower-girls and their servants, and at night their decks and cabins swarm with rich and dissipated Chinamen. Then their windows are brilliant with light, their decks are bright with fanciful lanterns, and they are noisy with laughter and the tinkling of strange stringed instruments, and they smell of hot samshu. Not the sort of place in which one would expect flowers to thrive! Alas! the flowers on those boats are human flowers. They are painted with brilliant colours, but not by the hand of nature.
The girls who live there are not vendors of buds and blossoms. “Flower-girl” is the name by which the over chivalrous Chinamen designate a woman who is professionally unchaste.
On the opposite side of the river’s mouth, but still farther from the city, are moored the miserable boats of the lepers. The saddest of sins and the saddest of diseases are within sight of each other. Both are outside the pale of Chinese society. Both are excluded from Cantonese citizenship.
Because of their isolation, I doubt that the recent fire occurred among the flower-boats. But among the small cargo-boats, among the thickly huddled sampans! Yes; likely enough there.
Surely it is horrible enough to live all one’s life in a Chinese sampan or in a small junk, without being burnt to death into the bargain. Drowning, now, is a very common occurrence on a Chinese river. No one takes much notice of that in Canton. To be sure the mothers put crude, home-made life preservers on their babies, or tie a long rope about their little yellow waists, fastening the other end firmly to the boat. So if a Chinese baby falls overboard (as it usually does two or three times a day), it has a very fair chance of floating or being hauled back. But the adults must take their chances, and extraordinary numbers of them manage to tumble into a watery grave. Hundreds of Chinese are born in sampans, live in sampans, die in sampans. Yet almost none of them can swim.
For one thing the canals and rivers are too crowded. There is no room for them to swim in. For another thing they have no time to learn how to swim. It’s all work and no play to most of the sampan dwellers.
Think of a family of ten or twelve, or even more, who live in a one-roomed boat, a boat not many times the size of a big row-boat. Think what their family life must be. And they are only one of myriad families. They live in a quarter denser than the densest of the crowded city streets. Think of the stench! Think of the din! Small wonder that they take drowning almost tranquilly. But to be burnt to death! That’s another matter. Even stolid Chinese philosophy may be expected to shrink from that. Think of being burned to death in a boat, on a river, and yet not being able to drown one’s death agony in the cooling water, because every inch of the water’s surface was covered with hundreds of other burning humans!
Such things happen not infrequently in China, and yet hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Chinese continue to live in the sampans and in the cargo-boats. They must live there. There is no place else for them to live; unless they leave China, and few of them have the wish to do that: none of them have the means. Their dire poverty drives them into the wretched boats and imprisons them there, and there they must remain until they die of old age, of overwork, of starvation, or die by drowning or fire, as the case may be. And the children born and bred on those boats! No wonder that when the boys are grown to manhood many of them are only fit to hide themselves within the leper-boats; that when the girls are grown to womanhood very many elect to have the comparative luxury of the flower-boats!
The Korean geisha probably gets more enjoyment out of life and is less conscious of wrong-doing than is the woman of any other race who follows the same profession. It follows naturally enough that the race whose standard of sexual morality is lowest, regards women of unchaste lives more leniently than does any other race. Then, too, the seclusion of Korean ladies is more rigid than the seclusion of the gentlewomen of any other Asiatic country. This makes the men of Korea entirely dependent upon the geisha girls for any outside female companionship, and the Korean man is very sociable, very fond of good times, and if he can afford it, apt to make not only a plaything, but rather a friend out of the girl whose profession it is to be amusing, entertaining and cheerful, at so much an hour.
The word geisha is a Japanese word, and it signifies “accomplished person.” The Korean word for the class of women of whom I am writing is ki-saing; but they are generally called geisha. The Japanese yoshiwara women are called geisha, as often as anything else.
In proportion to the populations of the two countries there are far fewer geisha in Korea than in Japan, but this is solely, I think, because Korea is so much poorer than Japan; for nowhere are women of their profession more appreciated, more esteemed, and treated by men more on an equality than they are in Chosön. The Korean geisha is systematically and carefully trained for her intended profession. Several years are occupied by her education, and not until she is proficient in singing, in dancing, in reciting, in the playing of many instruments, in repartee, in the pouring of wine, in the filling and lighting of pipes, in making herself generally useful at feasts and festivals, and above all, in being good-natured, is she allowed to ply her trade. In or near every large Korean city are picturesque little buildings called “pleasure-houses.” They are very like the tea-houses of Japan. They are usually built in some secluded spot, and are surrounded by the brilliance of flowers, and half hidden beneath the shadow of trees. They are scantily but artistically furnished, and are running over with tea and sweetmeats and girls.
The geisha of the King are, of course, the flower of the profession, and are dressed even more elaborately than the ordinary geisha, which is quite superfluous. They remind one very much, both in manner and in habit, of the posture girls of Burmah, and the European who was a looker-on at a festival in Li Hsi’s palace might easily fancy that when Thebaw was dethroned, his posture girls, whose occupation was of course then gone, had fleden masseto the court at Söul. Most Asiatic dances are slow. Probably the slowest of them all is the dance of the Korean geisha. Like all the dances of the Far East, with which I am at all familiar, it is absolutely free from vulgarity, or from suggested coarseness. The geisha herself is covered and covered from throat to ankle. It would be imprudent to say how many dresses she usually wears at once. She dresses in silk and in glimmering tissues. Before dancing she usually takes off two or three of her gowns, and tucks up the trains of the robes she still wears, but even so she is very much dressed, and a thoroughly well-clad person. In winter she wears bands of costly fur on her jaunty little cap, and an edge of the same fur about her delightful little jacket of fine cashmere, or of silk. She wears most brilliant colours, and all her garments are perfumed and exquisitely clean. Indeed, cleanliness must be her ideal of godliness. At least, it is the only godliness she knows, and, save the virtue of amiability, the only virtue she would be ashamed to lack. Her parents are poor, always very poor, and she is pretty, always very pretty. It is this prettiness which causes her almost from her babyhood to be destined for the amusement profession. It makes her suitable for that profession, and ensures her probable success in it. Her parents gladly set her aside from the toilers of the family, and she is given every possible advantage of mind and person. So she is insured a life of ease, and even of comparative luxury. She is a blooming, gladsome thing, with gleaming eyes, and laughing lips, and happy dancing feet. She looks like some marvellous human flower when you meet her in the streets of Söul, and forms an indescribable contrast to the draggled crowds that draw apart to let her pass as she goes on her laughing way to her well-paid work.
The geisha girls are greatly in demand for picnics, and in the summer often spend days in the cool, fragrant woods, playing for, reciting to, and feasting with some merry party of pleasure-makers. If their services are required at a Korean feast they usually slip in one by one when the meal is more than half done. The host and his guests make room for them, and each girl seats herself near to a man whose attendant she thus becomes for the entire evening. They pour wine for the men, and see that all their wants and creature comforts are well looked after. They do not eat unless the men voluntarily feed them. To feed them is to give them a great mark of favour, and it would be the worst of bad form for them to refuse any morsel so offered. After the feast they sing and dance in turn and together. They recite love stories and ballads, and strum industriously away upon funny Korean instruments. Their singing is very plaintive: as sad as any earthly music, but it is not sweet nor pleasing to European ears. The geisha are often employed to perform before private families, and not unfrequently before the harems of rich men or mandarins. To introduce them for an evening into the most respectable family circle is regarded as the best of good taste. Some of these girls live together, many of them live, nominally at least, in the homes of their own childhood. They form strange contrasts to their sisters of approximately the same age, whose lives have been lives of virtue and incessant work.
The geisha never by any chance become familiar with, or are treated familiarly by the women of the harems into which they are occasionally introduced, and yet some of them are not unchaste in their personal lives. This, however, is of course very exceptional. Occasionally the geisha becomes the concubine of a man of position, or the personal attendant of a man of wealth. When old age, that dread foe of woman the wide world over, creeps upon them, they become the teachers of the girls who are ambitious to become geisha.
No geisha girl expects to be entertained. It is her business to entertain. The moment she enters the presence of her employer or employers, she takes unobtrusively the thorough charge of the social side of the function. She makes herself useful and amusing, and agreeable in every possible way, and apparently has no thought of self. Often a large party of Korean gentlemen will go for a stay of some days to one of the monasteries that still dot the Korean hillsides. They usually take with them an incredible train of servants, and a number of geisha. Rare times they have on these excursions, and rare welcome do the monks give them. The monks and the servants and the geisha devote themselves to the lords of the situation. And the Korean man who goes picnicking to a Korean monastery probably has as good a time as any reveller in the East.
Such are the Magdalenes of the far Orient! To be pitied, to be deeply pitied, but to be less pitied than the Magdalenes of the West, for they are better housed, better treated, and less conscious of their misfortune. There is, I think, a good deal worth pondering over in the way the peoples of Asia deal with the great social sin—a sin from which our human race can scarcely hope for redemption, unless indeed,—