Chapter 7

Our first view of Seoul, in which the former Temple of Heaven is now a smoking-room in a Japanese hotel garden

The interior of a Korean house

Close-up of a Korean “jicky-coon,” or street porter

At the first suggestion of rain the Korean pulls out a little oiled-paper umbrella that fits over his precious horsehair hat

Like his neighbors, the Korean eats with chop-sticks, but he uses a flat metal spoon with his rice. This grain is the basis of the better-class meal, but is not so highly polished as in Japan; and it is too costly for the common people, who replace it with cheaper grains, especially millet. What may seem a hardship is really a blessing. The poverty which denies them some of the refinements of the table imposes upon the people of Korea a more healthful diet than that of their island neighbors; in the mass they are more sturdily built; if all other signs are insufficient one can usually distinguish a Korean from a Japanese by the excellence of his teeth. Besides his belovedkimshee, no Korean meal is complete without a pungent sauce made from beans pressed together into what looks like a grindstone and then soaked in brine, a sauce into which at least every other mouthful is dipped. Meat is more often eaten than in Japan; fish, as generally. But tea is not widely used; in its place the average Korean uses plain water, or the water in which barley or millet has been cooked, or, best of all,sool, cousin of the fierysakeorsamshuof the neighboring lands. Then come a dozen little side-dishes,—pickled vegetables, some strange, some familiar to us, cucumbers cut up rind and all, green onions, and some distant member of the celery family, all immersed in vinegar-and-oil baths, slices of hot red peppers, tiny pieces of some hardy tuber, brittle sheets of seaweed cooked in oil until they look as if they had been varnished, a jet-black kind of lettuce, and other odds and ends for which there are no equivalents in our language. Sugar is hardly used at all, and the adaptable traveler who learns to be otherwise satisfied with a native dinner usually rises to his feet with a longing for a bit of chocolate or some similar delicacy.

It is curious how geographical names often persist in our languages of the West long after they have become antiquated and even unknown in the places to which we apply them. The name “Korea,” for instance, means nothing to those who live in the peninsula we call by that term; nor for that matter did the word “Korai” from which we took it ever refer to more than a third of the country, and that long centuries ago. Ever since they absorbed the former kingdom the Japanese have striven to get the world to adopt the native name “Cho-sen” (the “s” is soft), a word already legitimized by several hundred years of use. But the world is notoriously backward in making such changes; perhaps it is suspicious of the motives of Japan, and a bit resentful at her attempt to render whole pages of our geographies out of date. Yetthere is nothing mysterious or tricky in the wholesale alterations in nomenclature which she has wrought in her new possession, though there is often irksome annoyance. Every province, every city, almost every slightest hamlet has been given a new name; but this has come about as naturally as the Frenchman’s persistent obstinacy in calling a horse acheval. It is a mere matter of pronunciation. A given Chinese ideograph stands, and has stood for centuries, for a given town or village of Korea. The Korean looks at the character and pronounces it, let us say, “Wonju”; the Japanese knows as well as we know the word “cat” that the proper pronunciation is “Genshu”—and there you are. It is hardly a dispute, but it is at least a new means of harassing the traveler. If he is American or English, or even French or German, for that matter, he will find that nearly all his fellow-countrymen resident in the country, mainly missionaries, have lived there, or been trained by those who have, since before the Japanese took possession, and that they know only the Korean names. If he has a guide-book, which is rather essential, it is almost certainly concocted by the new rulers or under their influence, and insists on using the Japanese names. So do the railway time-tables, all government documents, and the like. Thus he discovers that it is almost impossible to talk with his own people, at least on geographical matters.

“Have you ever been in Heijo?” he begins, with the purpose of pumping a compatriot for information on that second city of the peninsula.

“Never heard of it,” replies the old resident, with a puzzled air, whereupon the new-comer gives him up as a hopeless recluse and goes his way, perhaps to learn a few days later that this very man was for ten years the most influential foreigner in that very city, but that to him it has always been, and still is, “Ping Yang.” Thus it goes, throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula, so that the man who would mingle with both sides must know that “Kaijo” is “Song-do,” that “Chemulpo” is “Jinsen,” that what the guide-book and time-table call “Kanko” has always been “Ham-hung” to the missionaries, that every last handful of huts in Korea is known by two separate and distinct names, though the erratic slashes with a weazel-hair brush which stands for it in the ridiculous calligraphy of the East never varies. Long before his education has reached this fine point the traveler will have completely forgotten his resentment at finding, as he rumbles into it at the end of a long summer day, that the city he has known since has early school-days as “Seoul” is now officially called “Keijo.”

It doesn’t greatly matter, however, for the chances are that he has always spoken of it as “Sool,” which is the native fire-water, instead of using the proper pronunciation of “Sow-ohl”; and to learn the new name is easier than to change the old. Our own impressions of what was for more than five centuries the capital of Ch’ao-Hsien, the Land of Morning Calm, and is still the seat of the Government-General of Cho-sen, started at delight, sank very near to keen disappointment, then gradually climbed to somewhere in the neighborhood of calm enjoyment. Seen from afar, the jagged rows of mountain peaks that surround it should quicken the pulse even of the jaded wanderer. The promise that here at last he will find that spell of the ancient East which romancers have enticed him to seek, in the face of his cold better judgment, seems to rise in almost palpable waves from among them. Then he descends at a railway station that might be found in any prairie burg of our central West, and is bumped away by Ford into a city that is flat and mean in its superficial aspect, commonplace in form, and swirling with a fine brown dust. But next morning, or within a day or two of random wandering, according to the pace at which his moods are geared, interest reawakens from its lethargy, and something akin to romance and youthful enthusiasm grows up out of the details of the strange life about him.

There are, of course, almost no real streets, in the American sense, in the Far East; hence only those wholly unfamiliar with that region will be greatly surprised to find that the “many broad avenues” of Seoul, emphasized by semi-propagandist scribblers, are rather few in number and, with one or two exceptions, are sun-scorched stretches of dust which the rainy season of July and August will turn to oozing mud. But the eye will soon be caught by the queer little shops crowded tightly together along most of them, particularly by the haphazard byways that lead off from them into the maze of mushroom hovels that make up the native city. From out of these dirty alleys comes jogging now and then a gaudy red and gold palanquin in which squats concealed some lady of quality, though these conveyances now are almost confined to weddings and funerals; the miserable little mud hovels disgorge haughty gentlemen in spotless white who would be incredible did not the falsettorat-a-tatof ironing and the groups of women kneeling along the banks of every slightest stream explain them. There is constant movement in the streets of Keijo, a movement that might almost be called kaleidoscopic, were it not for the whiteness of Korean dress; but it strikes one as rather an aimless movement, aleisurely if constant going to and fro that rarely seems to get anywhere. Dignifiedyangbans, that still numerous class of Korea, and especially of the capital, which in the olden days was rated just below the nobility, strut past in their amber beads and their huge tortoise-shell goggles as if they were really going somewhere; but if one takes the trouble to follow them he will probably find them doubling back on their tracks without having reached any objective. In the olden days they could at least go to the government offices where they pretended to do something for their salaries; since Japan has taken away their sinecures without removing the pride that forbids them to work, there is little else than this random strolling left for them to do.

In contrast to this numerous gentry, outdistanced by modern changes, there are sweating coolies lugging this or that, bulls hidden under mounds of brown-red brushwood from some far-off hillside, sleek-haired women slinking by with an almost apologetic air, many of them with the uncovered, sun-browned breasts somewhat less general in the capital than elsewhere, here and there a Korean pony, cantankerous with his full malehood, all streaming to and fro between an unbroken gauntlet of languid shopkeepers in their fly-trap “household” caps, of mangy dogs and dirty children. “Old-timers” will tell you that this was not so long ago all there was to Seoul, except inside the several big palace compounds, now so uninhabited; that walking, still much in vogue among the Koreans, was for the overwhelming majority the only means of getting about the city. Then there were no rickshaws, not over-numerous even to-day after twelve years of wholly Japanese rule; then none of the little dust- or mud-floored tram-cars, now so crowded, bumped along the principal avenues; certainly no battered and raucous-voiced automobiles scattered terror among the placid foot-going population. It is not difficult to picture the comparative silence of that bygone Seoul, with slipper-clad footsteps pattering noiselessly through the dust, or the mild clumping of that cross between the Dutch wooden shoe and the Japanesegetastill worn in muddy weather, punctuated now and then by the booming of a mammoth bell, the mild hubbub of passing royalty surrounded by shrieking out-runners, and the incessant accompaniment of the falsettorat-a-tatof ironing.

With the definite coming of the Japanese much of that ancient Seoul has departed. The great wall that enclosed the city has been largely leveled, for the Koreans, according to their new rulers, can only fight behind walls. Only a pair of the imposing city gates remain, and these as mere monuments instead of entrances and exits. The IndependenceArch built to celebrate the end of paying tribute to Peking stands shabby, cracked, and blistered in a bed of sand in the ragged outskirts. Rubbish and worse litter the dark, wooden-slatted enclosure in which the mighty bell that once transmitted royal commands sits drunkenly and dejected on the ground. Vagabonds build their nests beneath the Oriental roof that shelters the stone-turtle monument of which the city was once so proud; the magnificent Altar of Heaven has become a garden ornament within the grounds of the principal hotel, and is generously furnished with Japanese settees and capacious cuspidors bearing the railway-hotel insignia. Of the three principal palaces one is a mere wilderness of weeds and vacant-eyed edifices; another houses the weak-minded remnant of the once royal family and has bequeathed most of its grounds to museum, botanical, and zoölogical purposes; the third, and most historic, is being completely hidden from the city by a mammoth modern building designed to become the headquarters of the Governor-General.

One might almost assume that a policy of blotting out the visible reminders of the old independent Korea had been adopted by the new rulers. Yet it is hardly that, I fancy, but mainly the utilitarian sense of modern improvement which is showing such small respect for the monuments of bygone Cho-sen. The Japanese are ardent in their efforts to make Seoul a city in the modern sense—the modern Western sense, I could have said, for their new structures are hardly copied from Japan. Imposing buildings that might have been transported from our own large cities are growing up for the housing of banks and important firms and government offices. There is already one genuinely asphalted street; new parks have been laid out where only wilderness or rubbish heaps were before. Besides the big central one there are adequate branch post-offices in every section of the city; police stations at every turn keep a watchful eye out for new candidates to the mammoth new penitentiary, built on the latest approved model, out near the “Peking Pass.” After their lights the new rulers are steadily improving the material aspect of the city, as of the whole peninsula. It would be too much to expect them to improve certain personal habits and domestic customs beyond the point which the Japanese themselves have reached, so that some forms of uncleanliness and undress, for instance, which a new American colony would quickly be forced to eradicate, have been given no attention.

The new rulers once planned even greater changes in the old city. They set about with the apparent intention of virtually moving it, orat least the commercial center of it, down nearer the River Han, in a section they called Ryuzan. There they built the railway headquarters and blocks of brick residences for the employees. A stone palace for the mikado’s viceroy was erected, streets laid out, and improvements impossible in the crowded portion of the city were projected. But commerce has a way of choosing its own localities; the Koreans are nothing if not conservative; local gossip has it that when Prince Ito was taken down to see his new residence he remarked to his well meaning subordinates that they might live down there in the swamp if they wished, but that he for one would stay in town. The prince is well known to have been no recluse and hermit who would deny himself the soft pleasures of cities. In the end his choice proved wise, for it is a rare rainy season that does not wipe out scores of native huts down along the Han and encroach upon the unused and isolated palace he rejected. The railway headquarters, residences, and school remain, and trains halt for an exasperatingly long time at Ryuzan station, so near that of Nandaimon to which most travelers are bound, almost as if the officials would vent their pique at having their will thwarted; but even the Japanese residents have preferred the old city. Along its southern edge, under the brow of Nansan Hill, dwell and trade that quarter of the fourth of a million of population which wears kimonos andgetas, and the stroller down “Honmachidori” and its adjacent streets, narrow, crowded, busy, and colorful as a thoroughfare of old Japan, could easily imagine himself back in the Island Empire, far from the languid, white-clad throngs of the Land of Morning Calm.

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