Chapter 9

Some of the figures, in the gaudiest of colors, surrounding the Golden Buddha in a Korean temple

The famous “White Buddha,” carved and painted in white, on a great boulder in the outskirts of Seoul

One day, descending the hills toward Seoul, we heard a great jangling hubbub, and found two sorceresses in full swing in a native house, where people come to have their children “cured”

Theyang-ban, or loafing upper class of Korea, goes in for archery, which is about fitted to their temperament, speed, and initiative

Half an hour or more after our arrival the sorceresses simultaneously changed their costumes to something quite different but equally fantastic, and after a deep drink and a long breath each they sprang again into the fray. They had already been at it for hours and might continue until dark. For these ceremonies seem to be rather of a wholesale nature, to which come all those who happen that day to have a devil to be exorcised, and the price of that service available. The bystanders made themselves comfortably at home, as is commonly the custom in the easy-going East, unawed by the great feats that were taking place before their eyes. Children played in and out of the throng; men, and some women too, placidly smoked their long tiny pipes; the sturdy fellow who had brought the paraphernalia of the sorceress calling slept babe-like on the box in which it had come, waiting for the word to carry it away again. Apparently there was nothing to be feared, except by the evil spirits which were being cast forth from within their absent or present victims. For some of the women had brought their ailing children in the flesh and were subjecting them to the noisy balderdash in ways that should have increased rather than diminished the demons of illness within them. How many mothers of sick infants came to that day’s ceremony was only suggested by the dozen or more present at one time. How many worldly-wise women of Korea, some of the most famous of them blind or boasting some other infirmity reputed to increase such powers, win their livelihood and even lay up small fortunes as sorceresses, even the statistics-loving Japanese overlords probably could not tell. One runs across them in wayside villages, in little valleys hidden by brush and rocks out among the hills all over the country—and in nearly every case there is a modern hospital run by missionaries or the Government no great distance away, sometimes, as here in Seoul, right on the road to the performance, where ailing infants would be readily admitted, probably at less cost than the fee of a sorceress.

The Japanese are so often accused of having no ideas of their own that perhaps I am mistaken in believing that they did not copy from some other nation their Railway School in Seoul. It is their own impression that the idea originated with the general manager of the Korean part of the South Manchuria Railway, and their opinion ought at least to be worth those of passing strangers. The plan is to recruit young boys after the usual six years of preliminary schooling and gather them together into a kind of railway West Point, where future employees of the railway shall be trained not merely in the immediate and mechanical things of their calling, but in general citizenship, inesprit de corps, in all those things which a body of men charged with so important a job as running a great railway system should have and be. There was already great eagerness to enter the school, though it was only in its third year, since the future for which it prepares is not only moderately bright but is definite and certain. At intervals competitive examinations for admission are given. The latest one had been attended by one thousand and eighty candidates, of whom a hundred and fifty were admitted to the school. The Japanese officials asserted, and seemed sincerely to believe, that, given equal preliminary training,Korean youths have equal opportunities for admission to the school and for preferment in what lies beyond. But the bare fact that of the five hundred and thirty-eight students only eighty were Koreans did not make it easy to accept this statement without question. It would scarcely be natural in any nation, let alone one of so tight a national feeling as Japan, to let such prizes get to any extent out of the hands of their own people.

The school is a big red-brick building, or compact cluster of them, down at Ryuzan, where the railroad community lives in an orderly, well built town of its own, and it has everything which even the most exacting peoples of the West expect a school to have. The principal is not a railroad man, but an M.A. and a famous pedagogue from Japan, and the whole curriculum is laid out with the idea of giving the future trainmen as broad a training as could possibly be of use to them in the line of work toward which they are heading. All of them take, for instance, six hours of English a week. They are taught the importance of courtesy in its practical as well as its ethical aspects—a point which seems to have been largely missed by the labor-union brotherhoods of the West. To the strictly utilitarian Occident some of the things taught would seem highly fanciful. We would hardly expect our engine-drivers to take fencing, samurai style, as well as jiu-jitsu, however handy these accomplishments might be in ridding their trains of hoboes. But the Japanese idea is to develop health and physique and a well-rounded personality as well as mere mechanical ability, the spirit of fair-play, character andesprit de corps, as well as mere laborers’ qualities, that there may be a railway morale, as there is in most countries an army and a navy morale. Thereby the founder of the school hopes to avoid what he calls “labor-union madness,” and at the same time to have men properly fitted to come into contact with the public; not merely pullers of throttles and takers of tickets. The school, as I have said, is barely three years of age, so that one could scarcely expect any distinctly visible results of the policy as yet in the railway itself, but the scheme strikes even the layman observer as at least one thing Japanese well worth imitating.

When the Russians and the Japanese grappled with each other a couple of decades ago, the railways of Korea, it will be recalled, were not linked up with those of Manchuria, destined to be the chief battleground. The little islanders pushed them quickly through, first in hastily constructed emergency form for military use, and later in a more finished manner. To this day they are straightening out curves andmoving higher up from flooding areas that were ill chosen in war-time haste, and here and there along the way lie bits of the old road-bed and the abandoned abutments of a bridge that is gone. Like the railways of Japan, those of Korea are government owned; but they are not government operated. The South Manchuria Railway system, comprising all the Treaty of Portsmouth transferred from the Russians to their victors, has been given, as a private corporation, the complete control of the lines in Cho-sen for a long term of years, so that both comprise virtually one system, and operate as two trunk lines—from Fusan to Mukden and from Dairen and Port Arthur to Changchun, with their various branches. There is nothing of the Japanese model about these railways; they are almost exact copies of those in the United States, with standard gage, American cars with only minor hints of European influence, even the deep-voiced whistle which so instantly carries any wandering one of us back to his home-land. There is no railroad in the world at which the carping traveler cannot now and then find fault, but on few will he be harder put to it to find just cause for grumbling often than on these two systems operated as one from Dairen.

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