FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS
"The Jap is the slant-eyed Hun of the Orient. He has a slant-eyed
ethics, a slant-eyed morality, a slant-eyed honesty, a slant-eyed social
consciousness; a slant-eyed ambition, a slant-eyed military system; and
a slant-eyed mind!" said Peter Clarke Macfarlane, the well-known author
and lecturer, one day when I was interviewing him on the Japanese
question.
"That's pretty strong, Mr. Macfarlane, in the light of your usual
conservatism," I commented.
"I say it carefully and after much thought. It is said to stay said so
far, as I am concerned," he added with finality.
This was also my own opinion, after spending three months in Japan and
Korea, another month in China; and another month or two in Manila;
catching the angle of Japanese leadership from every slant.
And after due consideration, and after a year to think it over
carefully, I am here to say, that I never saw, or heard of anything
worse happening in Belgium under German rule than that which I saw and
heard of happening under Japanese rule in Korea, Siberia and Formosa,
while I was in the Orient.
Suffice it is to say, at this point, that the Japanese is hated by the
whole Orient. I do not believe that the German Hun in his worst day was
ever hated more unanimously for his inhuman practices than is the Jap
Hun hated by the whole Orient to-day.
"Is it getting better or worse?" I am asked constantly.
"Worse!" I reply, and this reply is backed up by interviews I have had
with returned Korean missionaries.
I found the Japanese scorned and hated from one end of the Orient to the
other. As far south as Java, as far east as the Suez; as far north as
the uttermost reaches of Manchuria and Siberia; as far this direction as
Hawaii.
For instance, after I had been away from Korea for six months and had
come back to America I met a most conservative missionary in the Romona
Hotel in San Francisco. The last time previous to that meeting that I
had seen him was in Korea itself.
I said to him "Are things better or worse in Korea?"
His reply was, "Worse than they have ever been; generally speaking!" I
have no intention and no desire to further augment ill feeling between
America and Japan. In fact I do not fear anything like war in that
direction; but I do have an intense feeling of responsibility about
telling my readers the plain and simple truth that the whole Far Eastern
world hates Japan.
If that thought itself can get into the mind of America, this country
will understand, at least, that there is some fault that lies back in
the Japanese military policy and character itself. It hardly seems
possible, with ten races and five different countries hating Japan; that
Japan herself is not mostly to blame. When a matter of hatred is so
unanimous among all races in that part of the world, it is likely that
the fault lies with the race and nation which has the hatred of so many
types of people focused on its actions.
While I was in Java some high dignitaries in the Japanese Navy arrived
in Batavia. The Chinese Coolies who live in Batavia absolutely refused
to carry any Japanese officers or sailors in their Rickshas. It was a
striking indictment of the Japanese nation.
In Singapore the distrust and hatred of the Japanese is unanimous. In
the Philippines it is the same. In Hongkong you see few Japanese. They
are not wanted and they are not trusted. In Shanghai, and Peking it is
the same. The Student Movement, one of the most powerful weapons that
has ever arisen in any nation in the world, has focused the Chinese
sentiment against selfish Japanese aggression in China.
The Japanese officials laughed at the Student Boycott of Japanese goods
when it first started. But in a year they were trembling in the face of
that boycott. I was in Tientsin, and Peking during the days of the
Student Street Demonstrations. They were like American demonstrations.
Keen, alert, intelligent Chinese boys addressed the crowds admonishing
them not to buy Japanese goods in Chinese shops. The pressure became so
strong that all Chinese merchants from the lowest shopkeeper up to the
owner of the great chain stores, like our Woolworth institutions, put
away Japanese-made goods and refused to sell them.
I took dinner in Shanghai with one of the foremost merchant princes of
China and said, "Are you selling any Japanese-made goods?"
"I certainly am not. I am not powerful enough with all my millions of
money and all of my chain of stores to take such a chance as that. I
have put all of my Japanese goods in the cellar."
The Boycott against Japanese goods in China became so powerful that in
Tientsin, while I was there, the Japanese Consul complained bitterly to
the Governor of the Province and the Governor who was said to be under
the influence of Japanese money, arrested a lot of students. There was
one of the most determined and terrible riots that I have ever seen. It
was war. It was not like any mild American riot. It was war to the
death. Several students were killed and finally the pressure was so
strong that even this Japanese Agent was compelled to release the
imprisoned students. I shall quote from an editorial that I was asked to
write for the Peking _Leader_ during my stay in China:
The weapon which most worries the Japanese I should say, is the
boycott that the Students Movement has inaugurated. The
Japanese Government never had anything that quite worried it so
much. It is a weapon that is worth a thousand battleships, or
fifty divisions of soldiers. It is a weapon that will, if
continuously, and consistently and faithfully used, bring a
money-loving nation, like Japan to her knees, and send her
finally, scurrying like a whipped cur, with her tail between
her legs back home where she belongs.
I talked with a ragged Chinese boy through an interpreter just to find
what his reactions to the Japanese were. He was a beggar. He said, "The
Japanese has a heart like a dog and a liver like a wolf."
I quote again from the editorial in the Peking _Leader_:
All day I have been on the streets of Peking listening to
groups of students discussing the all absorbing-question of
the Boycott. I have not understood the characters printed on
their banners, but I have understood the light in Young China's
eyes. I can understand that language and that light, for it is
the language and the light of freedom, justice, liberty! I am
an American. I understand that light when I see it; and I know
also; that it is a light that can never be snuffed out. It is a
light that prison walls cannot hide and that the brute hand of
the invader cannot dim.
"And what are they protesting against?" is the question asked.
Primarily against the Japanese control of Shantung. Secondarily,
against a type of civilization which Japan represents; a civilization
that uses the weapons of frightfulness to accomplish its ends; a
civilization that steals a nation like Korea, compelling the abdication
of a weak Emperor at the point of the bayonet; and then using the avowed
method of extermination to deplete a subjected nation. The whole Orient
knows Japan and knows the methods that Japan has used and is using in
conquered territory. It is a continuous and continual policy of
extermination, frightfulness, and assimilation. This is the underlying
cause of the hatred of the whole Orient and the Far and Near East
against Japan; and this is the fundamental reason for the Students'
Boycott of Japanese goods in China.
One might devote an entire book to narrations of frightful cruelties
perpetrated by Japanese on Koreans, Siberians and Formosans; but that
would not be so strong as the setting forth of the underlying ethical
reasons for this universal hatred in which Japan is held.
However it might be quite honest and fair for this writer to set down
here several acts of frightfulness that came under his own personal
observation merely as casual illustrations of that which is going on all
the time.
One day I was walking with a missionary's wife through the streets of
Seoul. There was an excavation being made and a little railroad track
was being run along this excavation. A Korean boy had been set to guard
this track to keep folks from getting hurt when the dump car came down
its steep grade. He had been ordered by his Japanese employers to stop
all passage when the signal was given.
We were walking along when this Korean stopped an ordinary Japanese
civilian. He was of the low-browed type; mentally deficient I should
say; but quite the average type that is used by Japan to settle these
conquered countries.
The Korean held up his hands in warning.
The Japanese stooped over, picked up a stone as large as a cabbage head
and, with only a space of two feet between himself and the Korean,
threw it with all his force against the cheek of the Korean and smashed
his jaw in, tearing his ear off, breaking his jaw bone, and lacerating
his face fearfully. It was one of the most inhuman things that I have
ever seen done.
The missionary woman said to the Korean when the Jap ran; "Why do you
not report this to the Japanese police?"
"It would do no good. They would give no justice to me, and I would be
hounded to my death for reporting it."
One evening with a friend I had been speaking in Pyeng Yang. It was
midnight one Sunday and we were waiting for a train down to Seoul. As we
stood on the platform waiting; a north-bound train came in. It stopped.
As it stopped several Japanese train boys got off of the train. An old
white-haired Korean gentleman, about seventy-five years of age, stood on
the platform waiting for the train. He was intelligent looking; poised;
and well-dressed in the usual immaculately white robes.
A fifteen-year old Japanese train boy, seeing him standing there,
deliberately ran out of his way, lowered his shoulders like a football
charger and ran squarely into the old man, knocking him down to the
platform and ran on with a laugh and some muttered Japanese words.
The dignified Korean gentleman got up, brushed the dirt from his
clothes; did not even deign to glance at the offending boy; and walked
on as if nothing had happened.
This scene illustrates two things: First, the superiority of the Korean
mind and character to that of the Japanese. This is one of the causes of
the extreme frightfulness pursued by the Japanese. They instinctively
feel the superiority of their captives. It is not the first time in
history that a lesser nation has conquered a superior people.
This superiority in soul-stuff that the Korean has over that of the
Japanese is recognized immediately by all Europeans and Americans who
become, even in the least bit, familiar with the two peoples. The
sympathy of Christian civilizations is with the Koreans immediately.
The other thing that this simple scene illustrates, is the spirit of
ruthless cruelty and frightfulness that is bred in the very soul of the
youth of Japan toward the Koreans. Even the train boys can do a thing
like that without fear of punishment.
The first day that we were in Seoul, the capital city of Korea, Pat
McConnell and myself were walking down the main street of this
interesting city toward the depot. Parallel with us marched a squad of
Japanese soldiers. In front of them, going the same direction, was a
poor Korean workman pushing a small cart that looked like our American
wheelbarrow.
The Japanese soldiers were in formation and marching in the middle of a
wide street. But deliberately; evidently with orders from their officer
in charge; they edged over to that side of the street where the Korean
was walking and pushed him into the curb stone, kicking his barrow as
they passed, although this meant a useless swerving of, at least,
fifteen feet out of their course to do so. It was a case of deliberate
brutality.
"Korea is a land of trails and terraces," said a prominent missionary in
that fair spot to me one day as we were riding from Fusan to Seoul.
"And terror," added another traveler from America. "It is a land of
trails, terraces, and terror!"
One day a friend of mine was begging Baron Saito, the present
Governor-General of Korea, to stop the cruelties of the Japanese
gendarmes in villages in northern Korea. The Baron asked for the names
of those who had given the missionary his information about the
cruelties and he refused to give them.
"Why should you not give them?" asked Baron Saito.
"Because they would be killed for complaining," said the missionary.
Then he told Governor-General Saito how he had once complained to the
police department when a father and son were cruelly beaten in prison.
"Give me their names," said the gendarme.
"I will if you will give me a promise that they will be protected."
"No! I cannot do that! The gendarmes are very revengeful!"
I know personally of a Korean preacher who has done no greater crime
than to attend a meeting at a dinner given for released Korean
prisoners. He was arrested and kept in jail for three days, just for
attending that dinner.
Another preacher with whom I talked was suspected of collecting money
eight months after the March Independence Movement. When he heard that
the Japanese police were coming for him he fled. This angered the
police. They appeared the next morning at three o'clock at his home.
There were only the mother and a twelve-year-old daughter left. First
the gendarmes burst in the frail doors with the butts of their rifles,
and then from three o'clock in the morning until daylight, they beat and
tortured those two helpless Christian Korean women; kicking them all
over the house until they were unconscious. These two Korean women were
in bed for two weeks because of that night's experience and were not
able to walk for a much longer period than that.
And these women were educated, cultured women. They had committed no
crime. It was simply because they did not know where the father was.
Later the father and son were arrested. They were beaten cruelly in the
process of arrest although they offered no resistance. The son later
said to me, "I could stand it to be beaten myself and even to see my
father beaten but the unbearably cruel thing was to know that they had
beaten my innocent mother and sister when no man was there to protect
them."
I cite this instance because it happened eight months after the
Independence Movement, and three months after the so-called reform
Government of Baron Saito had been in effect and after the Japanese
Press had said to the world that all cruelties had ceased.
A case of frightfulness that was called to my attention; which seemed to
me to be the very essence of cruelty was that of the moral terrorizing
of an educated Korean Pastor, whom the police merely suspected of having
had something to do with the Independence Movement. They had no direct
evidence but submitted him to months of moral terrorizing which was the
worst I have ever heard of.
For months at a stretch they would suddenly appear outside of his home
and thrust their bayonets through his doors. Then they would go away
without saying a word. He had absolutely no redress. If he had
complained, he would have been thrown into prison.
One of the most reliable missionaries that I met in Korea told me of how
one morning the policemen came to a church in northern Korea during the
hour of service. They broke eighty windows, arrested fourteen men,
smashed the little organ with their gun butts, smashed a beautiful lamp,
tore up the mat seats from the floors, and burned them in front of the
church.
At the funeral service of another young Korean preacher, Pak Suk Han in
Pyeng Yang, hundreds of Japanese soldiers appeared with drawn bayonets
just to terrorize the people. The church was full of Japanese officers
with drawn swords.
"What would have happened if somebody in a fit of patriotism had shouted
'Mansei'?" I asked.
"We would have been killed instantly!" said the missionary soberly. "I
was afraid of that!"
A prominent, educated and English-speaking Korean official, told me that
in a conversation with a high Japanese official that that particular
Japanese had said "Our plan will be to assimilate the Korean people!"
"But that will be impossible. There are twenty million of us. You will
find that a hard thing to do!" said this Korean.
The Japanese official smiled and said significantly, "We know the way!"
The Korean knew what that meant. It meant extermination; extermination
in every way possible. It meant extermination by introducing
prostitution in Korea. This has been done. Korea never had any legalized
prostitution. Korea never knew what the Red Light Section meant. Japan's
first move was to introduce that. She sent her diseased women to Korea.
She made prostitution ridiculously cheap; fifty sen; which is
twenty-five cents in American money.
"Why?"
It is one of her ways of assimilation which means extermination and she
has already shot venereal disease rates up to an alarming state in
Korea.
Her next step in frightfulness was to introduce opium. Japanese Agents
raise thousands of acres of Opium in Korea and sell it. This is another
one of her steps in the process of assimilation or extermination.
Japan has stolen from poor Koreans their rice lands and their coal beds.
The process is for a Japanese company to buy the water sources of the
rice paddies below and then refuse to let the Koreans have water for his
rice fields. This is another step in frightfulness that will finally
exterminate the Korean if it keeps up long enough.
The recent massacre of Koreans in Manchuria by Japanese soldiers
illustrate the Japanese spirit.
This same policy of frightfulness is carried on in Formosa and in
Siberia and wherever the Japanese army and gendarme system has
authority. It is worse than anything that the Germans ever did in France
or Belgium. It has its only parallel in the dark ages.
I told Baron Saito, Governor-General of Korea this in an interview. He
wanted to know what America thought of Japan's rule in Korea. I said:
"America and the whole civilized world is stirred with indignation at
the Japanese rule in Korea. There has been nothing like it since the
dark ages." Then I read him a quotation from an editorial in _Zion's
Herald_, a church paper published in Boston with virtually those words
in it.
* * * * *
My friend, whom I met first in France, when he came back from. France
was sent to Siberia as a Captain in the American Army.
I met him in Manila just after he had returned from Siberia. He, in
common with all Americans who had seen the Japanese methods of
frightfulness in Siberia, was filled with hatred.
"One night," he said, "a company of Japanese soldiers entered the
little village six hundred miles north of Vladivostok where we were
located. They announced that they were hunting for Bolsheviks.
"They did not find any in the little village, although they ruthlessly
broke down every door of every home in that village. Then they went out
to a sawmill about three miles from town and brought in five boys
between the ages of twelve and eighteen.
"After torturing these boys in an old box car for two days, hanging them
up by the thumbs with their arms behind their backs until they were
unconscious; and then forcing salt water, hot water, cold water, and
water with pepper in it down their nostrils, alternately; and other
added cruelties; they announced to the village that they would release
them that night on the public square."
"Did they do it?" I asked anxiously, for I was stirred to my soul's
depths with his narration of cruelties in Siberia.
"Yes, they released them; in this way:
"They called all the friends and families of the prisoners together on
the public square. Then they dug five graves. Then five Japanese
officers came stalking across the public square, whisking at the
thistle-tops with swords as they came; and then walked up to these
innocent Russian boys, and whacked off their heads.
"Had they been tried?" I asked indignantly.
"They had been given no trial. They were mere boys, who, probably,
didn't even know what the word Bolshevik meant. It was the worst
illustration of frightfulness that I ever saw, although it was a common
thing for the Japanese troops to go through the country upsetting the
barrels of honey that the poor peasants were saving up for the long
winters; rooting up their young potatoes; cutting the throats of their
colts and cattle, and ravishing the land."
"How could you stand it?"
"We couldn't stand it. I had to fight to keep my company of Americans
from sailing into them with fists and bayonets. It would have meant war.
So I sent word back to headquarters that we were out of provisions and
we were called back to Vladivostok."
Can this scene be duplicated in Formosa and Korea, where the Japanese
hold sway?
It can.
During the Independence Movement in Korea this thing happened: All of
the Korean Christians had been asked to assemble in a church for a
meeting. When they were all in the church, the Japanese gendarme set
fire to the church and then fired into it, killing every man.
A woman, big with child, came running toward the church having heard the
shooting and knowing that her husband was within.
A big, burly Japanese pushed her back.
"What do you want?" he cried in Korean.
"I want to go in there. My husband is there," she cried in terror.
"But you will be killed if you go in there!"
"I don't care! I want to die if he is to die!"
"All right! You shall have your wish!" said the Japanese, and pulling
out his sword, cut off her head, killing her instantly. She fell at his
feet with her unborn child; and he laughed aloud at the spectacle.
This is Japanese frightfulness and it can be duplicated by many
missionaries in Korea if they dared to speak.
But the minute they speak and tell the truth that minute they are sent
home from their life work. They realize that this leaves the Koreans to
the utter and awful cruelties of the barbarous Japanese, and because of
this, in spite of their indignation they hold their tongues for the
larger good. But they eagerly give the facts to those of us who are
coming back to America so that America in turn may know what is going on
in Korea. That is the only hope; that the indignation of a righteous
world, without war, may bring pressure to bear on Japan to stop these
terrible cruelties and tortures; this unutterable frightfulness. This
is the hope of the missionaries; this is the only hope of the Koreans!
* * * * *
I don't know whether or not it was because I had been listening for so
long to the most brutal stories of Japanese treatment of Korean men,
women and children; with murder, rapine, burning of homes, especially
Christian homes; beating of a mother and her twelve-year-old girl from
three in the morning until eight to make them reveal the hiding-place of
their preacher daddy, that the crimson, blood-red sunset I witnessed on
my last night in Korea seemed to me like a "sunset of crimson wounds."
All I know is that it happened in Korea while I was there, and that my
soul had been, for a solid month, stirred to the depths of its righteous
wrath over the things that I had heard first-hand from human lips.
But there it was. The sky was blood-red. At first it was black, a somber
black. Not a coal-black but a slate black. Then suddenly just at the
edge of the horizon a crack began to appear. It was a slit of blood. It
looked more like a wound than anything else I ever saw. The slit of
blood grew larger and larger in the slate-black clouds.
Then suddenly all over the horizon these wounds began to break through
the mass of black clouds. Some of these slits were horizontal slits,
and some of them ran in graceful curves. Some of them looked as if a
bayonet had been lunged into the body of that somber cloud and a great
crimson gash was made with ragged edges as big as a house. Then it
looked as if some ruthless Japanese gendarme had taken his sword and
slashed a rip in the abdomen of that sky; and from side to side like a
crescent moon appeared this great crimson wound.
I had never seen a sunset just like it. But there it was. It seemed that
there was back of that great black cloud a blood-red planet, pouring its
crimson tides like a great waterfall down back of that slate-black mass
until finally the curtain of black began to tear, and the blood poured
through to run along the horizon, and splash against the clouds, and
slit its way like wounds through the clouds of night.
And I thought of something else. I thought how a Man once was crucified.
I thought how dark the skies were on that afternoon. I thought how
slate-colored and somber all life seemed, especially to that little
group of disciples. I thought of the wounds in His hands and feet and
side. I thought of the wounds the thorns in His crown made, and of the
blood that ran over His face. I could see Him there back of that cloud
in Korea. I could see His Christian people being crucified again
because of their religion. I could see Japanese bayonets thrust into His
side and Japanese nails through His feet and His hands. I could see a
Japanese crown of thorns on His head because He said, "Inasmuch as ye
have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it
unto me." And I could see the blood of his wounds breaking through that
nation's clouds on that wonder evening of the "sunset of wounds" back of
the Korean mountains in December.