SOME KOREAN SCENES AND CUSTOMS
It was our good fortune to dwell out over the hills beyond Seoul rather
than in the hot and often breathless city itself. The half-hour walk led
up past the big granite Bible School, along a little stream with its
inevitable clothes-paddling women, flanked the grave-mound of a little
prince, then climbed steeply over another half-wooded ridge from which
stretched a wide-spreading mountainous view, everywhere deep green
except for the broad brown streak of the River Han and here and there a
mushroom patch of village. An American mission college was building in a
big hilly pine-grove that owed its preservation to the tomb of a king’s
concubine. Pines as fantastic and sturdy as any in Japan stood out
against the sky-line; here and there a group of stinking chestnut-trees
kept them company. Before they were granted this semi-sacred site the
missionaries from our almost mythological land of “Mi-guk” had to agree
not to build anywhere overlooking the grave; they had already been asked
to close a path used as a short cut by students and an occasional
faculty member, because it ran along the brow of the hill above the
tomb. To look down upon a royal burial site is the height of disrespect
in Korea, hence they are all arranged after a fixed pattern designed to
avoid this sacrilege.
Out beyond the Todaimon, or East Gate, on the opposite side of the city,
is the tomb of a more famous queen; but we preferred what we called our
own, which is identical in form and size, and in a solitude much less
often broken. Besides, “ours” really contained the mortal remains, while
even the finger and a few bones which were all that remained after the
brutal assassination and burning of Korea’s last queen were now buried
elsewhere. Quite like ours are all the royal graves scattered up and
down the peninsula of Cho-sen, in the several regions where succeeding
dynasties built their capitals, flourished for a while, and fell, so
that leisurely to visit it was worth a hasty glimpse of many others.
We could wander up over the pine-clad hill to the grave, for all the
injunction against it; things are not so strict as all that in Korea,
unless something Japanese is involved. But it was more convenient, and
not merely more respectful, to approach the sanctuary from the bottom.
On a level space in the forest, wholly cleared of trees but thick with
grass, there was first of all the caretaker’s residence, a high-walled
compound set off in the edge of the woods to the left. In a direct line
down the center of the grassy rectangle stood first a _torii_, a square
arch made of three light tree-trunks painted red, the upper crosspiece
decorated with crude and fanciful carvings, a gateway without contiguous
fence or wall. The Koreans are sensitive about the use of this symbolic
entrance to their royal tombs; the caretaker of the little prince’s tomb
we passed on our way in or out of Seoul told us one day, when we found
that arch newly closed with barbed wire, that we might still pass
through the grounds, but not beneath the _torii_. A hundred feet or more
through this isolated entrance to her last resting-place stood the
concubine’s prayer-house, so to speak—a large building by Korean
standards, with a roof of highly colored tiles and four flaring
gable-peaks, along which sat as many rows of porcelain monkeys to guard
against evil spirits, as is the Korean custom. Through the many holes
that had been torn by time or inquisitive fingers in the oily paper
serving as glass between the slats of the many padlocked doors, one
could dimly make out a bare wooden floor, scattered with dust and bits
of rubbish, and a bare table-like altar on which, no doubt, boiled rice
and other foods are at certain intervals offered to the spirit of the
dead. It was plain that no such thoughtfulness had been shown recently,
for dust and dinginess and faded paint were the most conspicuous
features of the edifice, inside and out.
Two smaller but similar chapels flanked this main building, behind which
the grass-rug-ed ground rose gradually to the burial mound, another
hundred feet back and some ten feet high. In front of this plain
grass-covered hillock stood a huge stone lantern, like those in Japanese
temple grounds, in the opening of which the reverent or the
superstitious sometimes place offerings of rice. Directly behind this
graceful receptacle rose what we of the West would call a tombstone, a
high upright granite slab standing on a big stone turtle and carved with
Chinese ideographs briefly extolling the departed lady’s alleged
virtues. More fantastic still were the figures about the mound,
duplicated on either side. First came two large stone horses, such as
might be chiseled by some aspiring but untalented school-boy. Then a
pair of stone men, priests, or gods, recalling similar figures in the
ruins of Tiahuanaco beyond Lake Titicaca, gazed at each other with a
sort of smirking, semi-skeptical benignity. Two lions, two rams, and two
mythological beasts, even more crudely fashioned than the rest,
completed the menagerie, all these last with their backs turned to the
mound, out of respect for the departed. Finally an ancient stone wall
with tiled roof threw a protective semicircle close about all this at
the rear, beyond which the rather thin pine forest, gnarled and bent
with age, climbed the hill-slopes across which only disrespectful
mortals ever pass.
About the only Korean thing which moves rapidly is a funeral, and even
this may have been a concession to the incessantly sweltering summer. We
met one rather frequently in the streets of Seoul,—a barbarously
decorated palanquin in blazing reds and yellows, borne by eight or ten
coolies in nondescript garb, who jog-trotted as if in haste to be out of
reach of the evil spirit that had laid low the inert burden inside. If
the latter had been a man of standing and sufficient wealth, there were
two palanquins, the second bearing the actual remains, the first a false
bier meant to deceive the wicked beings of the invisible world. The rest
of the procession was made up of priests in fantastic robes and flaring
head-dresses, leaning back at contented ease in their rickshaws, and a
varying string of relatives and perhaps friends, most of them in
sackcloth and on foot. Just where these incongruously hurrying cortèges
finally brought up we never learned to a certainty until we ourselves
moved out over the hills.
In a hollow not far from our suburban residence rose the ugly red brick
chimney of what we at first took to be a small factory, but which turned
out to be one of the several crematories in the outskirts of Keijo.
Across the valley below us, by the little dirt road that wandered
through the flooded rice-fields, came several funeral processions a day,
announcing themselves by the shrieking auditory distresses which the
Koreans regard as music. The unseemly pace may have slackened somewhat
by this time for it is nearly five miles around the hills by the route
that even man-drawn vehicles must follow; but the clashing of colors was
still in full evidence, standing out doubly distinct against the velvety
green of newly transplanted rice. Now and again a procession halted
entirely for a few moments, while the carriers and pullers stretched
themselves out in the road itself or along the scanty roadside above the
flooded fields. We drifted down one day to one of them that was making
an unusually long halt, and found the chief mourner, a lean old lady of
viperous tongue, in a noisy altercation with the carriers over the price
of their services. But those who halted, or indulged in such
recriminations along the way were, no doubt, of the class that could not
pay for unchecked speed.
Several times, too, when whim took us to town over the high hill from
which an embracing view of Seoul was to be had, we saw processions
returning. Then they were quite different. The chief burden, naturally,
had been left behind, and the palanquins are collapsible, so that
mourners and carriers straggled homeward by the steep direct route as
the spirit moved them, the latter at least contentedly smoking their
long tiny pipes, and musing perhaps on the probability of soon finding
another victim. But the end and consummation of all this gaudy parading
to and fro remained to us only an ugly red brick chimney, standing idle
against its hilly background or emitting leisurely strands of
yellowish-black smoke, according to the demand for its gruesome
services.
Then one evening curiosity got the better of our dislike for unpleasant
scenes, and we strolled out to the uninviting hollow. In it, a little
above the level of the plain, sat a commonplace brick building with half
a dozen furnace-chambers not unlike those of a brick-kiln. Several
Koreans of low class, stripped to the waist, were languidly working
about it, now and then producing discordant noises, which was their
manner of humming a tune. Close before the principal building stood a
smaller one, from which rose the loud chanting of a single voice that
would have won no fame on the Western operatic stage. This, we learned,
belonged to the priest whose duty it was to give each client the
spiritual send-off to which he was entitled by the price of admission to
the furnaces. The cost of cremating a body, explained one of the
workmen, was twelve yen (nearly six dollars), but it included an
hour-long prayer by the priest. The latter was too steadily engaged in
his duties to be interrupted, but the cremators were openly delighted at
the attention of foreigners, and at the opportunity of helping us make
the most of what they called our “sight-see.” Into the ears of the
articulate member of our party, born in Korea, they poured the details
of their calling without reserve. _That_, inside the rude straw-mat
screen which stood between the house of prayer and the door to the
ovens, had come early in the afternoon, they explained, but he was only
a poor man and had to give precedence to his betters. We peered over the
top of the screen and saw a corpse completely wrapped in straw and
fastened to a board with ropes of similar material. Did we care to see
what was left of the last job? one of the coolies wished to know. It was
time that was finished, anyway. He led the way to the back of the
furnaces, opened an iron door, and, catching up a crude, heavy iron
rake, hauled out half a peck of charred bones and ashes. This, he
explained, unnecessarily, as he turned up one still glowing remnant of
bone after another, was a rib, that was a piece of what the man walked
on, and so forth. It was a rich man, he chattered on—to be rich in his
eyes did not, of course, imply being a millionaire—and he had been sent
here all the way from Fusan. The dead man’s relatives, he continued, as
he carelessly raked the still smoking débris into a tin pan and set it
aside to cool, had paid him to keep some of the ashes for them, instead
of dumping them in the common ash-heap. Rich people always did that. But
it was time to get that other fellow there out of the way, and go home
to supper.
“What did he die of?” we asked, as the straw screen was thrown aside and
the planked corpse fully disclosed to view.
“Of a stomachache,” replied one of the two coolies, as they caught up
plank, straw wrapping, and all, and thrust the last “job” into the
furnace, then salvaged the plank with a dexterous twist and jerk. No
flames were visible in the depositing-chamber itself; the heat was
applied externally, so to speak, perhaps as a sort of survival of the
olden days when Korean dead were wrapped in a mat and left to bake and
fester in the sun. We were turning away, satisfied for a lifetime with
one “sight-see” of that kind, when a sound, so out of keeping with the
matter-of-fact tone of the workmen as to be startling, brought us back
again. Out of the semi-darkness had appeared a Korean of the peasant or
porter class, past forty, lean and sun-browned; and with a wail that had
in it something of an animal in extreme distress, he flung himself at
the furnace door as if he would have torn it open and rescued the form
it had for ever swallowed up. We had never suspected the rank-and-file
Korean capable of showing such poignant grief. Nor was it seemly in one
of his standing, evidently, for almost at his second wail the three
carriers who had brought the body rushed down upon him and demanded
forthwith the price of their services. Their strident bargaining rose
high above the dismal, discordant droning of the so-much-a-yard prayers
that had never once ceased during our stay. The surly porters made it
plain that there was no time for vain mourning while the serious matter
of their hire was unsettled.
“He was my older brother,” wept the man, “the last of my family. Have I
any one left? Not one. And now....”
The unsatisfied carriers were still cruelly bullyragging him when we
left, and the sound of their quarreling voices, intermingled with the
never ending droning of the priest, came to us through the night after
we were well on our way home.
It is only the Buddhists who cremate by choice in Korea, and by no means
the majority of the people are of that faith. Many are mere
ancestor-worshipers, or placaters of evil spirits, or have a mixture of
several Oriental faiths and superstitions which they themselves could
not unravel. The non-Buddhists bury their dead, and thereby hangs, as in
China, a serious problem. For definitely circumscribed public cemeteries
will not do. The repose of the departed and the fortune and happiness of
his descendants depends upon the proper choice of a burial-place, which
is by no means a simple matter. It calls for the services of
sorceresses, necromancers, and other expensive professionals; it may
take much time; and the final indications may point to a most unlikely
and inconvenient spot. Green mounds, wholly unmarked except in the
rarest of cases, but each known to the descendants whose most solemn
duty it is to tend them, cover hundreds of great hillsides throughout
the peninsula, to the detriment of agriculture, Korea’s main occupation.
The Japanese took the Western utilitarian point of view and ordered
prescribed areas set aside for graveyards; but this was one of the most
hated of their reforms, and the right to lay away their dead at least in
private cemeteries has once more been granted to the Koreans.
Tucked away in the pine-clad hills about us were several little Buddhist
monasteries. The last word is deceiving, however, for there was hardly
anything monasterial about these semi-isolated retreats. In theory the
Buddhist monks and priests of Korea live in celibacy; in practice few
even of their most devout coreligionists pretend to believe that they do
so. About the tile-roofed clusters of buildings, varying mainly in
pretentiousness from the thatched homes of laymen, there was no dearth
of women and children; and the monks were the last in the world to deny
themselves the pleasure of wandering to the near-by city or up and down
the country as the mood came upon them. The brilliant saffron robe that
distinguishes the followers of the Way in central Asia, and adds so
vividly to the picturesqueness of lands farther west, is unknown in
Korea. A shaven head in place of the precious topknot is almost the
monk’s only difference in appearance from the ordinary layman; when whim
or a sincere desire to tread in the path marked out by Gautama sends him
out into the Korean world, the distinguishing hat of woven ratan may be
superimposed, but even the symbolic pretense of a begging-bowl hardly
marks him out from his more toilsome fellow-countrymen. For a long
period in the history of Korea, Buddhist monks were rated lower in the
social scale than even the peasants of the fields, and this attitude
toward them has survived, perhaps unconsciously, in a marked lack of
deference, almost an indifference to them, except in their official
capacity, or among an unusually superstitious minority.
In these monasteries the principal living-room—to use the word very
loosely—is floored with the thick oily brownish paper universal in
private dwellings, and the scant furniture is of a similar type. Perhaps
one of the big half-oval drums that call such of the monks as happen to
be within hearing to their not very arduous duties swings from the
center of the low ceiling; about the walls may sit a few bronze
ornaments or figures of some significance which totally escapes the
uninformed visitor. Certainly Gautama himself would not recognize the
barbarous gaudiness, the crowds of fantastic figures which clutter the
adjoining temples, as having been inspired by his simple teachings. Big
golden Buddhas in the center, behind a kind of altar and offering-table
in one, are flanked on either side clear around the three walls of the
room with hybrid manikins of Chinese mythology and demonology, often of
human size, which would outdo the phantasmagoric imaginings of any child
in terror of the dark. Fourth wall is there none, but only a long series
of double doors, which first open and then lift up to the horizontal,
where they are supported by quaint Oriental substitutes for hooks. If
the discreet rattling of a few small coins succeeds in accomplishing the
complete opening of the doors, the more than dim religious light of the
musty interior gives way to the glaring radiance of cloudless Korea, and
a myriad of details that are otherwise only suspected, if even that,
make their appearance. One discovers, for instance, that in addition to
the score or more of large figures in the gaudiest of greens, reds, and
all possible clashings of colors there are several times as many
figurines, knee-high or less, interspersed among them, as if these queer
puppets had their human quota of offspring. Like their adult companions,
these little effigies wear expressions varying all the way from that of
terrorizing demons to a smirking gentleness which suggests a well spent
babyhood. Mere words, however, are useless pigments with which to
attempt to picture the color-splashed paintings that cover the walls
behind the row of stodgy standing figures. All the chaos of Oriental
mythology seems to have been thrown together here, in battle scenes, in
court processions, in helter-skelter throngs of human beings in garbs
that were antiquated long before the Christian era, all fleeing in
terror from the mammoth central figure of some wrathful monarch, his
wildly bearded face painted jet-black to suggest the horror that his
countenance sheds upon all beholders. Every feature of these silent
temple denizens, be it noted, are Chinese, not Korean; and history tells
us that as late as the Boxer Rebellion it was not so much the European
troops as their black auxiliaries who put terror into the hearts of the
fleeing Celestials.
Gautama, the Buddha, as I have said, would puzzle in vain to find the
connection between the strange beings which clutter these Buddhist
temples and his own gentle doctrine. The medieval Christian, on the
other hand, should find himself perfectly at home in certain corners of
them, where are depicted such scenes as sinners fastened between two
planks in order to simplify the task of assistant devils nonchalantly
sawing them down the middle from crown to hips, in exactly the same way
that Oriental workmen turn logs into lumber to this day. Perhaps the
most surprising thing about these monasteries, to visitors from
Christian lands, is the complete lack of sanctity toward the objects
they worship which marks the outward behavior of the inmates. Casual
callers of other faiths, or of the absence thereof, are as freely
admitted to the most sacred corners as the monks themselves. The
elaborate genuflections and throaty chantings of a group of bonzes in
full barbaric regalia at the behest of a group of peasants come to lay
offerings of rice and copper coins before a favorite figure may be
followed a moment later by the tossing of a dirty altar-cloth or a dusty
old rag over the head of the same god to whom they have just been
appealing so grovelingly. Whatever their faults, there is always
something charming about the tolerance of Buddhists. No small number of
Christian missionaries in Korea spend their summer furloughs in the
monasteries of this gentle rival faith.
We struck out one Sunday afternoon over the high hill directly north of
us, to visit the famous White Buddha, carved and painted on a great
stream-washed rock cliff in the outskirts of the capital. It needs much
less of a climb beneath the blazing sun of midsummer Korea to leave one
drenched, but the view from the crest soon made that a half-forgotten
detail. Of the hills rolling away into mountains on every hand, or the
broad brown Han flecked with its rectangular junk-sails, little need be
said; such scenes are commonplace in Cho-sen. But the complete panorama
of Keijo, erstwhile Seoul, beginning at the very base of the
perpendicular rock cliffs below us and stretching from the “Peking Pass”
to far beyond Todaimon Gate, from ill sited Ryuzan to the section of old
city wall along a mountain ridge which the Japanese have permitted to
stand, called for a longer breathing-spell. Ancient Chinese-roofed
palaces, efforts at modern buildings which somehow still seem
unacclimated, the mainly Japanese city to the south of Shoro-dori—that
broad street which distinctly separates Keijo into two nearly equal
portions—the acres of yellow-brown thatched Korean huts of the northern
half so compact as almost to seem a great hayfield, all stand out with
the clearness of an illuminated engraving. Most incongruous, as well as
most conspicuous, of all the details of the picture are the homes and
other structures of the Christian missionaries, of red brick, and
standing forth, if the time-worn comparison is legitimate in such a
connection, like sore thumbs. Statistics assert that of the quarter of a
million dwelling in Seoul only two hundred are Caucasians, a statement
which there is no good reason to question, but which nevertheless seems
strange from any such point of vantage above the city, for the big
twin-spired Catholic cathedral alone, on the commanding site it has been
true to form in choosing, seems to imply far more than that number. It
was not merely the sounds of washing and ironing coming up to us in a
great muffled chorus from the city below on this brilliant Sunday
afternoon, however, which reminded us that for all these obvious
edifices we were in no Christian country.
At the foot of the swift jungle-clad descent to the narrow suburb along
the northern highway our ears were suddenly assailed by a great jangling
hubbub. We crowded into the little courtyard of the square-forming house
from which the sounds arose, and found that we had stumbled upon a
sorceress performance. Numbers of men and children and many women were
jostling one another along the wall-less fronts of two rooms on opposite
sides of the yards, inside which the typical native hocus-pocus was at
its height. On the papered floor of each room a sorceress was hopping,
posturing, grimacing, and from time to time shrieking, with an activity
which at least could not leave her open to the charge of physical
laziness. I am no custodian of fancy-dress ball costumes, hence I can do
little more than appeal to the vivid imaginations of those better fitted
for the task to picture to themselves the incredible regalia in which
these two middle-aged females, with the worldly wise faces, were
swathed, though I can throw in the hint that they would not have
suffered from cold six months thence, and that head-dresses which seemed
to have been built, and then improved upon and built some more, about
sections of stovepipe formed the crowning feature of their make-up.
We gave our attention mainly to the older, more agile, and more
demoniacal of the pair. In one hand she swung incessantly a curved knife
half as long as herself, and in the other a big clumsy iron
three-pronged spear not unlike the one attributed to Father Neptune, one
of her principal objects evidently being to slash and prod and swing as
near the credulous beings who crowded about her as she could without
inflicting actual physical injury upon them. In one corner sat half a
dozen dejected-looking men picking at native musical instruments as they
howled, and seeming to resent that the despised sex occupied the center
of the stage. Several ordinarily dressed women stood or squatted along
the walls. These, it was explained to us, had sick children and had come
to have the malignant devils that had entered their little bodies
exorcised and driven out. From time to time the sorceress called upon
them to rise and join in the dance, particularly to posture in the
center of the room while she made wild lunges at them with her two
weapons. At other times they were ordered to kneel and bow their heads
to the mats before what seemed to be imaginary gods or devils behind the
displays of food set around the edges of the room. Now and again they
ate bits of this, and at certain rather regular intervals the sorceress
ceased her hopping, lunging, and posturing to partake copiously of some
native drink respectfully tendered her by women of the house, or by
those who had come to get the benefit of her ministrations. Through it
all the dejected male orchestra, squatted on the floor in a corner,
screeched incessantly some incredibly discordant Korean conception of
music.
[Illustration:
Some of the figures, in the gaudiest of colors, surrounding the Golden
Buddha in a Korean temple
]
[Illustration:
The famous “White Buddha,” carved and painted in white, on a great
boulder in the outskirts of Seoul
]
[Illustration:
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”
]
[Illustration:
The _yang-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, in _esprit 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 and _esprit 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 and
moving 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.