FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE
Three great Flash-lights of Failure stand out in the Far East and the
Oriental world to-day; one being the failure of a race to survive,
another being the failure of the world to understand that Shantung is
the Holy Land and not the appendix of China; this sacred shrine of the
Chinese which has so carelessly and listlessly been given over to Japan;
and the third being Japan's failure to understand that methods of
barbarism from the Dark Ages will not work in a modern civilization.
"Why are they making all this fuss over Shantung?" an acquaintance of
mine said to me just before I left America. "Isn't it just a sort of an
appendix of China, after all? If I were the Chinese, I'd forget Shantung
and go on to centralize and develop what I had."
That was glibly said, but the fact which the statement leaves out of
reckoning is that Shantung is the very heart and soul of China instead
of being the appendix.
The average American has so often thought of China just as China; a
great, big, indefinite, far-off nation of four hundred million people,
always stated in round numbers, that Shantung doesn't mean much to us.
Yes, but it means much to China.
It means about the same as if some nation should come along and take New
England from us; New England, the seat of all our most sacred history,
the beginning of our national life, the oldest of our traditions, the
burial-place of our early founders, the seat of our religious genesis. I
don't believe that many folks in New England would desire to be called
an appendix of the United States.
So one of the things that I was determined to do when I went to China
was to go from one end of Shantung to the other, talking with coolies,
officials, old men and young men, students, and those who can neither
read nor write; missionaries and soldiers; natives and foreigners; to
see just what importance Shantung is to China as a whole.
The first thing I discovered was that it has about forty million people
living within the limits of the peninsula, close to half the population
of the United States. Does that sound as if it might be China's
appendix? You wouldn't think so if you saw the cities, roads and fields
of this great stretch of land literally swarming with human beings, and
every last one of them, as busy as ants.
I rode one whole day across the peninsula. I happened to be traveling
with a man from Kansas. He was a man interested in farming and
wheat-growing. For hundreds of miles we had been passing through land
that was absolutely level and every inch of it cultivated. I had been
saying to myself over and over again, "Why, it's exactly like our Middle
West Country."
Then much to my astonishment this Kansas man turned to me, and said,
"Did it ever occur to you that these fields of Shantung look just like
Kansas?"
"Yes, it has just occurred to me this minute," I responded.
Then the wife of the Kansas man said, "I have been shutting my eyes and
trying to imagine that I was in Kansas, it's so much like home."
"And say, man, but a tractor on those fields would work wonders," added
a portion of William Allen White's reading constituency.
And that is exactly how Shantung strikes an American when he has ridden
all day through its great stretches of level fields. He can easily
imagine himself riding through Kansas for a day.
My first visit to Shantung was at Tsingtao, the headquarters of the
German concession and now of the Japanese concession. I spent a day
there, and took photographs of the wharves and town. On the wharves
were still standing hundreds of boxes marked with German names and the
inevitable phrase "Made in Germany." Those boxes were mute reminders of
the evacuation of one nation from a foreign soil. But standing side by
side with these boxes were also other hundreds, already being shot into
Shantung in a steady stream; and these boxes have a new trademark
printed in every case in English and Japanese, "Made in Japan."
I spent several days in Tsinanfu and Tientsin, two great inland cities,
and more than a week in cruising about through Shantung's little towns,
its villages and its sacred spots.
I heard of its mines and of its physical wealth. But the world already
knows of that. The world already knows that this physical wealth of
mines and raw material was what made it look good to Germany and Japan.
But the thing that impressed me was its spiritual wealth.
The thing that makes Shantung attractive to the Japanese, of course, is
not the spiritual wealth, as the world well knows. Perhaps the Japanese
have never considered the latter any more than the Germans did; but the
one thing that makes it most sacred to the Chinese, who are, after all,
a race of idealists, is its treasuries of spiritual memories and
shrines.
In the first place, many Chinese will tell you that it is the "cradle of
the Chinese race." I am not sure that histories will confirm this
statement. And I am also not sure that that makes any difference as long
as the idea is buried in the heart of the Chinese people. A tradition
often means as much to a race as a fact. And the tradition certainly is
well established that Shantung is the birthplace of all Chinese history.
So that is one of the deeply rooted spiritual facts that makes Shantung
sacred to the Chinese.
The second spiritual gold mine is that one of its cities, Chufu, is the
birthplace and the last resting-place of the sage Confucius. And China
is literally impregnated with Confusian philosophy and Confucian
sayings.
I took a trip to this shrine in order to catch some of the spiritual
atmosphere of the Shantung loss. The trip made it necessary to tramp
about fifteen miles coming and going through as dusty a desert as I ever
saw, but that was a trifle compared with the thrill that I had as I
stood at last before the little mound about as high as a California
bungalow; the mound that held the dust of this great Chinese sage.
During the war I stood before the grave of Napoleon in France. Before I
went to France I visited Grant's tomb. I have also stood many times
beside a little mound in West Virginia, the resting-place of my mother,
and I think that I know something of the sacredness of such experiences
to a human heart, but somehow the thrill that came to me on that January
morning, warm with sunlight, spicy with winter cold, produced a feeling
too deep for mere printed words to convey.
"If we feel as we do standing here on this sacred spot, think of how the
Chinese feel toward their own sage!" said an old missionary of the
party.
"Yes," added another, "and remember that the Chinese revere their
ancestors and their sages and their shrines more than we ever dream of
doing. Any grave is a sacred spot to them, so much so that railroads
have to run their trunk lines for miles in a detour to avoid graves.
These Chinese are idealists of the first water. They live in the past,
and they dream of the future."
"When you get these facts into your American heads," added a third
member of the party, not without some bitterness, "then you will begin
to know that the Chinese do not estimate the loss of Shantung in terms
of mineral wealth."
At Chufu, the resting-place of Confucius, there is also the spot of his
birth, and this too is most sacred to the Chinese nation. We visited
both places. I think that I never before quite realized just what the
loss of Shantung meant to these Chinese until that day, unless it was
the next day, when we climbed the sacred mountain Taishan, which is
also in Shantung.
"It is the oldest worshiping-place in the world," said the historian of
the party. "There is no other spot on earth where continuous worship has
gone on so long. Here for more than twenty centuries before Christ was
born men and women were worshiping. Emperors from the oldest history of
China down to the present time have all visited this mountain to
worship. Confucius himself climbed the more than six thousand steps to
worship here."
"Yes," said another missionary historian, "and this mountain is referred
to twelve separate times in the Chinese classics, and great pilgrimages
were made here as long ago as two centuries before Christ."
That day we climbed the mountain up more than six thousand stone steps,
which are in perfect condition and which were engineered thousands of
years ago by early worshipers.
The only climb with which I can compare that of Mt. Taishan is that of
Mt. Tamalpais overlooking San Francisco. The climb is about equal to
that. The mountain itself is about a mile in height, and the climb is a
hard one to those who are unaccustomed to mountain-climbing, and yet
thousands upon thousands climb it every year after pilgrimages from all
over China.
We climbed to the top of Taishan, and saw the "No-Character Stone"
erected by Emperor Chin, he who tried to drive learning out of China
hundreds of years ago. We saw the spot on which Confucius stood, and
glimpsed the Pacific Ocean, ninety miles away, on a clear day. It was a
hard climb; but, when one stood on the top of this, the most sacred
mountain of all China, he began to understand the spiritual loss that is
China's when her worshiping-place is in the hands of aliens.
"And don't forget that Mencius, the first disciple of Confucius, was
born and died in Shantung, too, when you are taking census of the
spiritual values of Shantung to the Chinese," was a word of caution from
the old missionary who was checking up on my facts for me. He had been
laboring in China for a quarter of a century.
"And don't forget that the Boxer uprising originated in Shantung, and
don't forget that it is called, and has been for centuries, 'the Sacred
Province' by the Chinese. It is their 'Holy Land.' And don't forget
that, from Shantung, coolies went to South Africa in the early part of
this century and that the Chinese from Shantung were the first to get in
touch with the western world. And don't forget that nine-tenths of the
coolies who went to help in the war in France were from Shantung!" he
added with emphasis. This was a thing that I well knew, for I had, only
a few weeks before this, seen two thousand coolies unloaded from the
_Empress of Asia_ at Tsingtao.
No, Shantung is not an appendix of China, as many Americans suppose; but
it is the very heart and soul of China. It is China's "Holy Land." It is
the "Cradle of China." It is the "Sacred Province of China." It is the
shrine of her greatest sage. It is the home of "the oldest
worshiping-place on earth." It is because of its spiritual values that
China is unhappy about the loss of Shantung, and not because of its
wealth of material things.
The failure of the world to understand what Shantung means to China and
the failure of Japan to understand that they cannot for many years stand
out against the indignation of the entire world in continuing to keep
Shantung is one of the great spiritual failures of the Far East in our
century.
The second great failure is the tragic failure of an entire race of
people; that of the Ainu Indians of Japan.
It is a pathetic thing to see a human race dying out; coming to "The End
of the Trail." But I was determined to see them, in spite of the fact
that people told me I would have to travel from one end of Japan to the
other; and then cross four hours of sea before I got to Hokkaido, the
most northern island of Japan, where lived the tattered remnants of
this once noble race.
The name of this dying race is pronounced as if it were spelled I-new
with a long I.
These are the people who inhabited Japan before the present Japanese
entered the land from Korea and drove them, inch by inch, back and north
and west across Japan. It was a stubborn fight, and it has lasted many
centuries; but to-day they have been driven up on the island of
Hokkaido, that northern frontier of Japan where the overflow of Japan is
pouring at the rate of four thousand a year, making two million to date
and only about fifty thousand of them Ainus.
"Are they like our American Indians in looks, since their history is so
much like them?" I asked my missionary friend.
"Wait until you see them, and decide for yourself. I know very little
about American Indians."
So one morning at three o'clock, after traveling for two days and nights
from one end of Japan to the other, and then crossing a strait between
the Japan Sea and the Pacific Ocean to the island, we climbed from our
train, and landed in a little country railroad station.
It was blowing a blizzard, and the snow crashed into our faces with
stinging, whip-like snaps.
I was appointed stoker for the small stove in the station while the
rest of the party tried to sleep on the benches arranged in a circle,
huddled as close as they could get to the stove.
We were the first party of foreigners of this size that had ever honored
the village with a visit. And in addition to that we had come at an
unearthly hour.
Who but a group of insane foreigners would drop into a town at three
o'clock in the morning with a blizzard blowing? Either we were insane,
or we had some sinister motives. Perhaps we were making maps of the
seacoast.
And before daylight half of the town was peeking in through the windows
at us. Then the policemen came. They were Japanese policemen, and did
not take any chances on us. Even after our interpreter had told them
that we were a group of scientists who had come to visit the Ainus they
still followed us around most of the morning, keeping polite track of
our movements.
About five o'clock that morning, as I was trying to catch a cat-nap, the
newsboys of the village came to get the morning papers which had come in
on the train on which we had arrived. They unbundled the papers in the
cold station; their breath forming clouds of vapor; laughing and joking
as they unrolled, folded and counted the papers; and arranged their
routes for morning delivery.
It took me back to boyhood days down in West Virginia. I did the same
thing as these Japanese boys were doing. I, too, arose before daylight,
climbed out of bed, and went whistling through the dark streets to the
station where the early morning trains dumped off the papers from the
city. I, too, along with several other American boys of a winter
morning, breathed clouds of vapor into the air, stamped my feet to keep
them warm, and whipped my hands against my sides. I, too, unwrapped the
big bundles of papers, and did it in the same way in which these
Japanese boys did, by smashing the tightly bound wrappers on the floor
until they burst. I, too, counted, folded, put in inserts, arranged my
paper-route and darted out into the frosty air with the snow crunching
under my feet. How universal some things are. The only difference was
that these boys were dressed in a sort of buccaneer uniform. They had on
high leather boots, and belts around their coats that made them look as
if they had stepped out of a Richard Harding Davis novel. But otherwise
they went through the same processes as an American boy in a small town.
When the vanguard of villagers had come to inspect us, they at first
tried to talk Russian to us. They had never seen any other kind of
foreigners. They had never seen Americans in this far-off island.
When daylight came, we started out on a long tramp to the Ainu villages.
They were a mile or two away on the ocean. These people always build
near the sea if they can. Fishing is one of their main sources of food.
We spent the day in their huts. They live like animals. A big, square
hut covered with rice straw and thatch, with a fence of the same kind of
straw running around the house, forms the residence. The only fire is in
the middle of the only room, and this consists of a pile of wood burning
on a flat stone or piece of metal in the center. There is no chimney in
the roof, and not even an opening such as the American Indians had in
the tops of their tepees. I do not know how they live. The smoke finds
its way gradually through cracks in the walls and roofs. One can hardly
find a single Ainu whose eyes are not ruined. The smoke has done this
damage.
The only opening in their houses besides the door is one north window,
and it is never closed. In fact, there is no window. It is only an
opening.
"Why is that? I'd think they would freeze on a day like this," I said to
the guide.
"They keep it that way all winter, and it gets a good deal below zero
here," he said.
"But why do they do it?" old Shylock demanded.
"It is part of their religion. They believe that the god comes in that
window. They want it open, so that he can come in whenever he wishes. It
offends them greatly when you stick your head through that window."
Pat tried it just to see what would happen, just like a man who looks
into the barrel of a gun, or a man who takes a watch apart, or wants to
hit a "dud" with a hammer just to see whether it is a dud. The result
was bad. There was a sudden series of outlandish yells from the
household. I think that every man, woman and child, including the dogs,
of which there were many, started at once. I wonder now how Pat escaped
alive, and only under the assumption that "the good die young" can I
explain his escape.
I wanted some arrows to take to America as souvenirs; and, when an old
Indian pulled out a lot of metal arrows on long bows with which he had
killed more than a hundred bears, I was not satisfied. They were not the
kind of arrows I wanted.
"What kind are you looking for?" I was asked.
"Flint arrow-heads," I responded.
"Why, man, these Indians have known the use of metals for five hundred
years. The stone age with them is half a thousand years in the past."
"Have they a history?" I wanted to know.
My interpreter, who has much knowledge of these things, having worked
among them for years, said, "All of the Japanese mythology is centered
about the battles that took place when these Indians were driven out of
Japan proper step by step."
I was surprised to find that they were white people compared with the
Japanese who were their conquerors. There are other marked differences.
The Ainus are broad between the eyes instead of narrow as are the
Japanese. They are rather square-headed like Americans as compared with
the oval of the Japanese face. They do not have markedly slant eyes, and
they are white-skinned. They might feel at home in any place in America.
I have seen many old men at home who look like them, old men with
beards. This came as a distinct surprise to me.
At each house, just in front of the ever-open window of which I have
spoken, there is a little crude shrine. It is more like a small fence
than anything that I know, a most crude affair made of broken bamboo
poles. Flowers and vines are planted here to beautify this shrine, and
every pole has a bear-skull on it. The more bear-skulls you have, the
safer you are and the more religious you have become.
Pat was sacrilegious enough to steal a skull in order to get the teeth,
which he wanted as souvenirs. I was chagrined and shocked at Pat's lack
of religious propriety. However, I was enticed into accepting one of the
teeth after Pat had knocked them out and stolen them.
"How do they worship bears and kill them at the same time?" I queried
the guide.
"That's a part of the worship. They kill the bear, slowly singing and
chanting as they kill him. They think that the spirit of every bear that
they kill comes into their own souls. That's why they kill so many. That
seventy-year-old rascal over there has killed a hundred. He is a great
man in his tribe."
"If I was a bear," commented Pat, "I'd rather they wouldn't worship me.
That's a funny way to show reverence to a god. I'd rather be their devil
and live than be their god and die." Pat is sometimes loquacious. "They
dance about the poor old bear as they kill him. One fellow will hurl an
arrow into his side, and then cry out, 'O spirit of the great bear-god,
come enter into me, and make me strong and brave like you! Come, take up
thine abode in my house! Come, be a part of me! Let thy strength and thy
courage be my strength and my courage!'"
"Then," said the interpreter, "he hurls another arrow into him."
"And what is Mr. Bear doing all that time?"
"Mr. Bear is helpless. He is captured first in a trap, and then kept and
fattened for the killing. He is tied to a tree during the killing
ceremony."
"All I gotta say is that they're darned poor sports," said Flintlock
with indignation. "They're poor sports not to give Mr. Bear a fighting
chance."
And old Flintlock has voiced the sentiments of the entire party.
Everybody that was at the Panama Pacific International Exposition will
remember the magnificent statue of an Indian there. This Indian was
riding a horse, and both were worn out and drooping. A spear which
dragged on the ground in front of the pony was further evidence of the
weariness of the horse and rider. The title of this Fraser bronze was
"The End of the Trail," and it was intended to tell the story of a
vanishing race, the American Indians. But even more could that picture
tell the story of the Ainus of Japan.
"They will be entirely extinct in a quarter of a century," our guide
said. "They are going fast. They used to be vigorous and militant, as
Japanese mythology shows. They were a fighting race. They built their
houses by the sea. They used to go out for miles to fish, but now they
are so petered out that they go only to the mouths of the rivers to
fish. They used to hunt in the mountains, but they do not take
hunting-trips any more. Venereal diseases and rum (saki) have depleted
them year by year, just as in the case of our American Indians. They are
largely sterile now. They used to build their own boats, but they build
no more. It is a biological old age. Their day is through."
"It is a sad thing to see a race dying out," said Pat.
"Especially a white race, as these Ainus seem to be," said another
member of the party.
And back to the village we went silently, plodding through a driving
blizzard that bore in upon us with terrific force. As we fought our way
through this blizzard, I could not help feeling a great sense of
depression. It is a fearful thing to see anything die, especially a race
of human beings. That is a great epic tragedy worthy of a Shakespeare.
That is enough to wring the soul of the gods. That a race has played the
game, has been powerful and conquering and triumphant, and then step by
step has petered out and become weak and senile until biological decay
has set in--that is fearful.
Another illustration of the ignominious failure of a lower type of mind
to understand a higher type of mind is set forth in the following
letter which was written at my request by a missionary whom I met in San
Francisco just as the final chapters of this book were being written.
The first time I met this missionary was in Seoul, Korea.
I have been told so many times that the cruelties in Korea have been
stopped. Certain men said that they had been stopped immediately after
the Independence Movement, but they were not stopped. At frequent
intervals the American press is flooded with statements which come from
Japanese press sources that the outrages in Korea have ceased.
I said to this missionary, who had just arrived from Korea, "Is it true
that the cruelties have stopped in Korea?"
"No! They have not stopped! They have not even diminished! They are
getting worse, rather than better!"
"Would you be willing to write out, in your own handwriting, a few
things that you know yourself which have occurred since I was in Korea
so that the book which I am writing may be accurate and up to date in
its facts?"
"I will be glad to do that for you! We who are missionaries dare not
speak the truth!"
"Why?"
"If we did the Japanese Government would never let us get back to our
people!"
"Then you may talk through me, if you are willing to do it. I want the
truth to get to the American people!"
"I am not only willing but I am eager to talk!" said this missionary and
wrote out the following story of cruelty against an educated and
cultured Korean, who was the Religious and Educational Director in the
Seoul Y.M.C.A. This story of the latest Japanese barbarisms I pass on to
the reader in this chapter to illustrate another ignominious Hun failure
to understand that the practices of the Dark Ages will not work in this
century:
"On May 26th, 1920, just as Mr. Choi was coming out of his
class room he was met by two detectives, one Korean and one
Japanese, who informed him that he was wanted at the Central
Police Station. Here he was turned over to the Chief of Police
and thrown into a room and kept all day. Mr. Brockman and Cynn
both made several attempts to find out why he was arrested.
Each time they were given an evasive answer. Finally Mr. Cynn
insisted that they tell him the cause of the arrest. It was
finally discovered that he was wanted in Pyengyang on certain
charges. He was to leave Seoul that evening on the 11 p.m.
train. Anxious to see how Mr. Choi was being treated, Mr. Cynn
and several of the Y.M.C.A. men went down to the station. Mr.
Choi with the other six students were standing on the platform.
Apparently Mr. Choi was not bound as is the usual custom.
Closer observation, however, revealed the fact that his hands
were bound with cords, but in his case the ropes were placed on
the inside instead of the outside, of the clothes. He arrived
in Pyengyang the next day, May 27, at 5 p.m. Instead of taking
Mr. Choi first they called in one of the students whose name is
Chai Pony Am. After the usual preliminary questions these
inquisitors of the Dark Ages said, 'We know all about you
everything you have done. There is no use for you to deny
anything. You make a clean confession of everything.' Mr. Choi
replied, 'I have done nothing. If I knew what you wanted, I
would tell you.' More pressure was urged in the way of
bombastic speech. Finally the police said, 'If you won't tell
of your own free will we will make you tell!' Then the
tortures, which the Government published broadcast had been
done away with, began. They brought out a round stool with four
legs and laid it down on its side with the sharp legs up and
made him strip naked. Then they took the silken bands (about 2
in. wide) and placing his hands behind his back until the
shoulder blades touched begun bending the arm from the wrist
very tight. This completed, they made him kneel upon the sharp
edge of the legs of the stool with his shins. Then they took
the bamboo paddle (this is made of two strips of bamboo about 2
in. wide and 2 ft. long wound with cord) and begun beating him
on the head, face, back, feet and thighs. Every time they
struck him his body would move and the movement cause the shins
to rub on the sharp edges of the stool. To further increase the
pain they took lighted cigarettes and burnt his flesh. This was
continued until the student fainted and fell off. They then
would restore the patient by artificial respiration and when he
refused to confess, continued the torture. This process was
continued for 45 minutes and then the student was put into a
dark cell and kept for three days. Upon the third day he was
again brought before these _just_ policemen and asked if he
were ready to confess. Said they, 'If you do not tell us this
time we will kill you. You see how the waters of the Tai Pong
(the river at Pyengyang) wear smooth these stones. That is what
we do with those who come in here. Many have been killed in
here. Your life is not worth as much as a fly.' He was
tortured in the same manner as before and then put back into
the cell for another three days. This process was continued
every three days for two weeks.
"When Mr. Choi, the educational director of the Y.M.C.A. was
called in the police said, 'You are an educated gentleman and
we propose to give you the gentleman's treatment. We do not
want to treat you like ordinary men. Now we want you to tell us
what your thoughts have been and are. Make a confession of
anything you have done since March 1st, 1919.' Mr. Choi said,
'What do you want me to confess? If you will give me a little
time I will write you out something.' This they refused to do
and said, 'Since you refuse to tell us we will make you tell.
We will treat you like all other dogs.' Then they forcibly took
off his clothes, and proceeded to bind him in the same manner
as the previous student. After being bound he was placed on the
stool and beaten. He did not lose his consciousness but fell
off the stool, and then was placed back and the same process
continued. When Mr. Choi fell off the stool the bands on his
arms were loosened and they proceeded to unloosen and rewind
his arms. This time they wound them tighter than before. At the
ends of these bands are brass rings which are placed next to
the flesh and made to press upon the nerves. This time Mr. Choi
said as they wound his right arm he felt a sharp pain and at
once noticed that he had lost the use of his arm. It was
paralyzed. Mr. Choi was tortured five times in all--one every
three days. The first torture lasted one hour and the
succeeding ones were less severe than the first. At the end of
two weeks, June 10th, Mr. Choi and the six students with him
were called before a police captain who said to the students,
'There is nothing against you. Some bad Korean has testified
falsely against you. We are sorry you have suffered but you can
now go free.' However to Mr. Choi he said, 'You must remain
here a week yet. You are still under police supervision. Go to
---- hotel and stay.' On June 16th the police came to the hotel
where he was staying and said, 'You may go down to Seoul
tonight.' Mr. Choi arrived in Seoul on the 17th and gave this
testimony. His arm is still paralyzed."
And so it is that these great failures stand out: the failure of a race
of people to survive; the failure of the American people to estimate the
loss of Shantung at its proper valuation spiritually, and the failure of
Japan to understand that Korea is still and ever shall be _Korea the
Unconquered_; this Korea which I call "The Wild Boar at Bay."