The Korean method of ironing, the rhythmicrat-a-tatof which may be heard day and night almost anywhere in the peninsula
The Korean method of ironing, the rhythmicrat-a-tatof which may be heard day and night almost anywhere in the peninsula
The Korean method of ironing, the rhythmicrat-a-tatof which may be heard day and night almost anywhere in the peninsula
Winding thread before one of the many little machine-knit stocking factories in Ping Yang
Winding thread before one of the many little machine-knit stocking factories in Ping Yang
Winding thread before one of the many little machine-knit stocking factories in Ping Yang
The graves of Korea cover hundreds of her hillsides with their green mounds, usually unmarked, but carefully tended by the superstitious descendants
The graves of Korea cover hundreds of her hillsides with their green mounds, usually unmarked, but carefully tended by the superstitious descendants
The graves of Korea cover hundreds of her hillsides with their green mounds, usually unmarked, but carefully tended by the superstitious descendants
It is not, of course, quite the same to a Korean to be beaten by the police as it seems to us. Flogging has been practised in Korea as far back as records go, and it is not unnatural that Japanese gendarmes should consider this the only sure way of really reaching the intellect or getting the truth out of some Koreans. But they failed to see that while men punished in this time-honored way by their fellow-countrymen might not feel particularly humiliated, might take it almost like a son from his father, they would deeply resent being so treated by Japanese aliens, little men whom they have always heartily despised. Certainly some ugly stories are still afloat, and all indications point to the probability that the torturing of prisoners—and of witnesses—still goes on in the secrecy of some police stations, the perhaps real disapproval of higher authorities notwithstanding. To say that the same thing sometimes occurs in New York is not to make the practice any less reprehensible.
Once convicted of a crime, it is another matter; but when a man is suddenly arrested without warning and imprisoned for weeks, months and sometimes more than a year without knowing what charge has been made against him, without being allowed to get a word in or out of prison, even to notify some one to communicate with his family or see a lawyer, or to do anything but sit and await the good pleasure of his jailers, which may include being bambooed for two hours daily, the infliction of the “water cure,” the clamping of the fingers, the hanging up by the thumbs, the forced squat, and many other ingenious tortures which are guaranteed to leave no telltale marks on the body, it is not a sign of civilization but a remnant of the barbarism from which Japan tries hard to prove to the world that she has entirely recovered. Once the police get a confession by such methods there is no going back on it, we were told, no matter how innocent the sufferer really may be. His case is turned over at once to the procurator, and only after he has been twice condemned can he have counsel. The French system of considering the accused guilty until he proves his innocence prevails, and the chief of police has often been known to sit behind the judge and virtually to give him his orders as to what is to be done with the prisoner at the bar. Nine months in prison merely as a witness has been the experience of many a Korean Christian. Interpreters, even in important conspiracy cases, where it may be a matter of life and death,are reputed to mistranslate testimony in favor of Japanese or in favor of conviction. There is a classic case of an American missionary arrested during the independence movement on the charge of “harboring prisoners,” simply because he did not drive out of his house convert students whom he knew to be innocent and whom the police were eager to torture. Though he was ill at the time, he was refused permission to have a bed brought from his house to the bedless prison, was not allowed even to send word of his whereabouts to his wife, was keptincommunicadofor fifteen days, during which he was grilled by a haughty Japanese official who spoke to him only in “low talk,” such as one uses to coolies, and after four trials his punishment was reduced from one year’s imprisonment to a fine of a hundred yen.
Perhaps the most repulsive custom of the Japanese police in Korea, from our Western point of view, is their indifference to domestic privacy. They march even into school-girls’ dormitories or women’s apartments with or without provocation; American missionary women traveling in the interior have often been compelled to admit policemen to their quarters at inns or in the homes of converts not only after they have prepared for bed, but several times during the night, merely to answer over and over again their silly “Who-are-you? How-old-you? Where-you-come-from? Where-you-go?” questions.
The many reforms that have recently been introduced into Korea, say its residents, would have been of far more credit to the Japanese if they had thought of them before rather than after the independence movement of March, 1919. The handling of that, by the way, was a typical example of Japanese stupidity. The independence agitation which broke out simultaneously all over the peninsula was merely a demonstration to prove to the outside world that the Koreans had not been so completely and successfully “Japalacked” (as the missionaries, with no unbounded love for the little brown Prussians of the East, put it) as the Japanese at the peace conference led the world to suppose. Their city walls had been torn down; they had no weapons; the native Christians, who were foremost among the agitators, had refused to have anything to do with the demonstration until it was agreed that there should be no violence. If the Japanese had acted with the jovial moderation which their power over the peninsula made quite possible, the movement would very likely have been nothing more serious than a kind of lantern procession on a national scale. There is an anecdote floating about the Far East to the effect that half a dozen British “Tommies,” strolling down the street of a city in India, were met by amob shouting the Hindu version of “Long live Gandhi!” They neither raced back to the barracks for their rifles nor fell upon the crowd with such weapons as they could snatch up; they merely began shouting with the natives, “Long live Gandhi!” Within five minutes the demonstration had broken up in peals of laughter at the antics of the soldiers and their ludicrous Hindustani accent. Whether it is true or not, the story illustrates a great weakness of the Japanese. Almost no nation is so devoid of a sense of humor, as we use the phrase; that is, they are wholly incapable of permitting anything but the greatest solemnity of word or deed concerning their persons, their country, or their “sacred” institutions.
Instead of treating the “Mansei” movement as more or less of a joke, therefore, they acted with incredible childishness, as well as quite unnecessary brutality. Groups of unarmed Koreans gathered on hills overlooking the towns, shouted “Mansei!”—which is merely the Korean form of the Japanese “Banzai!” or “Ten Thousand Years!” and means something like “Long live Korea!”—then scattered. The silly police ran hither and thither, distracted. The honor of their nation, the luster of their military caste, the glory of their god-descended ruler might have been at stake. They arrested sixty school-boys eight years of age because some one among them had shouted the dreadful word, and they kept them at the police station until ten o’clock at night. A high official quizzed a roomful of little girls with such questions as how they could expect liberty, and where they would get money to run the Government, if they had it. When they answered, woman-like, “Oh, we’d get it,” the Japanese on the platform foamed at the mouth and devised ingenious ways of punishing the tots for their temerity. Brutalities like ours in Haiti, and worse, were perpetrated on the population. Students were beaten if they admitted they attended mission schools. They were asked at ferry stations and other points of concentration whether they were Christians, and if they replied in the affirmative they were cut with swords and otherwise mishandled by soldiers and police. If they denied the allegation, even though they were known to be converts, they were not abused, the idea seeming to be to get them to apostatize. Prisoners were tied together and driven on forced marches of sometimes a hundred miles, sleeping on plank floors full of cracks, with no food whatever on examination-day (otherwise known as “torture-day”). Great gangs were marched into Ping Yang from the country roundabout, many of them virtually unable to walk, and with carts of dead ones behind. Women who had shouted “Mansei!” weretaken to police stations, stripped, and marched around while the police amused themselves by burning them with cigarettes. Whether or not they were violated, they were subjected to every other form of indignity. The Japanese claim that “not a few policemen and their families in isolated stations were ruthlessly massacred,” and that they were therefore provoked to harsh measures. But they neglect to give the exact chronology of the affair, which indicates that they were the first to adopt harsh measures, and that Korean violence was in retaliation for their unnecessarily stern suppression of what probably would have remained a bloodless demonstration. Thus all the complaints, dissatisfactions, and grievances that had been repressed within the breasts of the people of Cho-sen for ten long years broke out at last like the cataract through a broken dike.
Those not friendly to them say that the Japanese police are cowardly as well as bullies, citing such examples as a group of Americans being mobbed only a few yards from one of the innumerable police stations in Seoul during our stay there, without a single white uniform appearing on the scene. Since the establishment of civil government some Koreans have been made gendarmes and otherwise given positions of authority, but as so often happens in such cases, many of them are more cruel to their fellow-nationals, and more itching with curiosity as to the doings of foreigners, than the Japanese themselves. Up to the time of the “Mansei” movement the Japanese scorned to study Korean and tried to force the Koreans to learn Japanese instead, again aping the Germans in Poland. But they have learned the disadvantages of using Korean interpreters and depending on native stool-pigeons for information, so that now they offer five yen a month in addition to the regular salary of those who have a workable knowledge of the native tongue.
The Japanese learned considerable from the uprising of 1919, but they still have something to learn. There are officials yet who advocate fines and flogging for Koreans who refuse to hoist the flag of Japan on national holidays. A modicum of common sense should teach any people that a national flag is a symbol of patriotism the display of which should be only an expression of free will, that patriotism can never be forced into the hearts of a people, and that any false show of it is much worse than worthless. Even shops which close as a sign of protest against certain Japanese doings are compelled by the police to open their doors. When the warshipMutsuanchored in the harbor of Chemulpo, the port for Seoul, every visitor who went on board wascompelled to salute the common sailor on sentry duty at the gang-plank, who barked like an enraged bulldog at any one who did not perform the ceremony with the deepest solemnity. Until they cure themselves, or are cured, of this ridiculously Prussian point of view on matters pertaining to their national life naturally the Japanese will not be able to see that it is silly to speak of the “wickedness” of trying to change, or even of talking of changing, a given form of government, that as a matter of fact any form of government is no more sacred than an old pair of shoes that has served the wearer moderately well.
We of the West should not forget, however, that the “white peril” has been a much more actual thing to the Japanese than the “yellow peril” ever was to us. Korea was not only a convenient spring-board for Russia and the whole white world behind her, but it was a greater source of danger to Japanese health than Cuba in its most yellow-feverish days ever was to us. Old residents paint a distressing picture of pre-Japanese Seoul—narrow streets plowed up into bullock-cart ruts, no general means of transportation except one’s own feet, however deep the mud, corpses of those dying of cholera left before any “rich” man’s house, forcing him to bury them. The Korean royal family was “liberally provided for” and left in possession of their palaces and their titles in perpetuity on condition that they would not interfere in any way with the new Government or the people of the peninsula. The sop of titles of nobility was thrown to influential Koreans who were likely to make trouble, and seventy-six new peers stepped forth from their mud huts. The Japanese claim that they spend ten million dollars a year on the occupation of Korea, that with its need of schools, roads, trees, sanitation, and many other things the peninsula is a great burden to them. “Though it is treason to say so now,” a high-placed Japanese in Seoul assured me, “Korea will eventually get her independence, as soon as she can stand on her own feet and protect herself—and us—from the north.” Possibly this was mere prattle meant to throw me off the scent, but I have met some Japanese intelligent enough sincerely to believe in this eventual solution.
The American and European merchants in Korea think that the Japanese did on the whole better than any one else could have done in handling the situation, and that the Koreans cannot possibly govern themselves. So, for that matter, do most of the missionaries. Russia would have forced the Greek church upon the people, they say, but would have left the lowest form of inefficient and unsanitary burlesqueon government. They would virtually have encouraged the persistence of ignorance and filth that made the Hermit Kingdom in every sense a stench to the nostrils of the world and a land of but two classes of people, the robbers and the robbed. “If Japan were to say to us to-morrow, ‘Here’s your country; run it yourselves,’” said a man who was trained to become prime minister under the old régime, “there are not bright men enough in it to form a cabinet.” The people have sometimes been made to suffer, the merchants go on, in such matters, for instance, as the taking of their land to build roads—for in old Korea as in China to-day highways were mere trespassers on private domain; but on the whole Japan has been no rougher than the United States or England in the countries they have taken over.
The agitation of Koreans for independence, the foreign laymen in the peninsula claim, emanates from self-seekers in foreign lands, and from the young students of mission schools, “especially American mission schools”; and the two “provisional governments,” one in the United States, and one, which has been in existence since the annexation, in Shanghai, do not at all represent the wishes of the Korean people as a whole. As it is, they are ground between the two millstones of the Japanese on the spot and these exiled governments, which send agents to make life miserable for those who fear one or both of them may some day come into power. Even the old politicians and office-holders are content, if we are to believe the men of commerce, now that even the Japanese have discovered that few military chiefs are of a type to make successful colonial governors, and that their subordinates, especially of the lower ranks, are almost always tactless, to say the least. But business men have a tendency the world over to praise anything that tends to keep “business as usual,” and one will probably come nearest the truth by striking a balance between their impressions and those of the missionaries, crediting the latter with somewhat more sincere, because less self-seeking, motives.
Whatever his personal opinion on the usefulness of foreign missions, no one with his eyes half open can set foot in Cho-sen without being impressed by the Christian influence, or at least by the number of missionaries, converts, and churches. He may be highly amused at the many subdivisions of that faith, by reason not merely of minor matters of creed and national lines but of such political cleavages as that caused by our Civil War, so nearly obliterated at home, which bewilder the natives like a countryman in a department-store with the wide choices of salvation offered them by—to mention only some of theAmerican varieties—the “Northern” Presbyterians and the “Southern” Presbyterians, the “Northern” and the “Southern” Methodists, the Kansas Baptists and the Oklahoma High Rollers, for all I know, all guaranteed to give equal satisfaction. But the very intensity with which native converts regard these arbitrary lines of division, much slighter among the missionaries themselves, and the care which “Bible women” and country pastors take to keep their charges from wandering into any adjoining heretical sheepfold, is an evidence of the genuineness of their new beliefs.
Whether or not Christianity is the one and only true faith, it seems to be an established fact that it thrives under persecution. Protestant mission work began in China in 1808, in Japan in 1859, but not until about 1888 in Korea; yet there is to-day only a scattering of native Christians in the two former countries as compared with the hordes of them in Korea. Many towns, even Ping Yang, second city of the peninsula, are almost more Christian than “pagan”; and the missionary boast that Korea will be a Christian land within a generation or two does not sound so wild as many another statement that drifts to the ear of the naturally skeptical wanderer. There is some evidence to show that this rapid progress is considerably due to those very Japanese who are least eager for the Christian faith to spread. The law of Japan and Korea grants absolute freedom of religious belief and practice, but even the passing layman can plainly detect something very close to persecution of Christians by some of the Japanese authorities in the peninsula, though it be only unconscious and unintentional, which it probably is not. While the Catholics have been there much longer, and have often carried things with a high hand, it is the Protestants in particular, and especially the American missionaries, who seem to have won most of the Japanese ill will. This I believe to be almost more because of the fact that they are Americans than because they are missionaries. As Americans they just naturally resent the lack of human liberty, of “self-determination,” to use the catchword of the hour, which Japanese rule in Korea means. The opposite point of view is bred in their bones. Though they never opened their lips on the subject, their mere unconscious attitude, their negative lack of approval of the existing state of things politically, cannot but seem to the Koreans an approval of their own opposition to the Japanese. Obviously, the study of American history, even of American literature, in the mission schools adds to the discontent of young Koreans with the present status of what was once their own country, even though the teachers lean over backwardin the effort not to mix academic and political matters. In fact, while the missionaries might deny it, it may be that the Koreans are rallying in increasing numbers about the American sponsored churches as much under the mistaken impression that the Americans are secretly sympathetic to the throwing off of the alien yoke, even by violence if necessary, as from the conviction that the American brands of salvation are the only sure passwords at the celestial gates.
At any rate, the Japanese seem to have concluded that American missionaries were behind the independence movement of 1919, and that they are still not to be entirely trusted. Now, I am as certain as I am of anything in this uncertain world that not a single American missionary was in the conspiracy of the “Mansei” demonstration. A very few may have known something about it, at least have felt in the air that something was coming; but it was no business of theirs to turn tattletales and run to warn a Government which had usurped since most of them came to Korea and had not treated them with any notable kindness, besides having what should have been an ample supply of its own spies to pick up such information. But the Japanese have not our way of thinking. They are ready enough to have the missionaries render unto Cæsar what belongs to him by keeping out of politics, but at the same time they seem to expect them to lend a hand to the extent of passing on to the authorities any hints or rumors that may be of use to them.
However, the independence demonstration and the unwise acts it brought in its train have trailed off into history. The more intelligent Japanese officials seem to have seen the light and acquitted the American missionaries of any active and conscious part in it, and the new governor-general and his immediate aids even sometimes call them into conference to get their point of view on subjects in which they are involved. But there is still an undercurrent of something akin to persecution of the American churches. As in the case of the persistent rumors of police floggings in spite of the new law forbidding them, it is impossible to make certain whether this is due to deliberate disobedience of orders by recalcitrant subordinates, to secret instructions at variance with those made public, or to pure stupidity, of which the Japanese have their liberal quota. In every mission town there is a detective in charge of matters pertaining to missionaries. He attends all services, comes hotfooting it whenever a foreigner stops even for lunch at a mission, demanding information concerning him back to thenth degree of absurdity, asks the future plans of the church almost daily, and other stupid and impertinent questions. In some districts the police still literally hound the church—demand lists of all contributors, send spies to stand at the church door and take note of every Korean who enters, burst noisily in during prayer, order new women converts not to attend services. Even the missionaries strike one as being rather afraid of the police, though this may merely be due to their strenuous efforts to avoid giving further offense and to come more than half-way toward established friendship with the political authorities; it can easily be imagined how native pastors and the simple converts are affected by a brutal attitude.