JAPANESE AND MISSIONARIES IN KOREA
In Korea the traveler who has seen them at home gets a somewhat
corrected picture of the Japanese. It is as if they had put their best
and their worst foot forward there simultaneously, and cause for high
praise lies plainly side by side with reasons for strong censure.
Everyone in the peninsula seems to admit that materially Korea is much
better off for having been taken over, lock, stock, and barrel, by
Japan. Intrigues, the selling of offices, brigands, few and virtually
worthless police, catch-as-catch-can tax methods to impoverish the
people, a government so corrupt that there was not a breath of hope left
in the country or the hearts of its inhabitants—there remained in all
the peninsula of Cho-sen little but the most primitive agriculture in an
almost wholly deforested land when the Japanese at length took upon
themselves the task and the pleasure of administering it. But like our
involuntary wards of the West Indies and elsewhere, the Koreans object
to being forcibly improved, and it is not, one comes to the conclusion,
merely disgruntled, because dispossessed, native politicians who are
creating the continued growl of dissatisfaction.
For all the admitted improvements they have brought, in spite of a
distinct change of policy now under a civil instead of a military
government, even the mere passer-by will scarcely fail to hear a long
list of Korean grievances against the Japanese, and he is not unlikely
to see some of these exemplified before his own eyes. The Japanese make
so free with the country, run the complaints; they treat it as something
picked up from the discard, with all signs of its former grandeur
obliterated, no memory even of a former existence. They always speak of
“Japan proper” when they mean their native islands, as if this great
peninsula, more than half as large as their Empire “proper” including
Formosa, and with seventeen million people who are distinctly not
Japanese, were a mere tatter on the garment itself. They change without
a by-your-leave not only the form of government but the very names of
the provinces; they interfere in the minutest matters of every-day
life—require people to walk on the left side of the street, for
instance. Those who came when the country was first taken over did
anything, the complaints continue, took anything, that pleased their
fancy or appealed to their appetites, without payment, or at whatever
they chose to pay. A new governor chased this riffraff out of the
peninsula and a better class is now in evidence; but even these strike
the passing observer as “cockier,” more arrogant than the average in
Japan—and perhaps somewhat brighter.
One is quickly reminded of Poland under the Germans, from whom it might
easily be suspected that the Japanese copied almost verbatim in their
annexation of what was once Korea. Japanese get the cream of mines,
factories, and other concessions; the advantages given the “Oriental
Development Company,” in reality a semi-official, strictly Japanese,
concern, amount to a scandal. The monopoly bank does about as it sees
fit in rates and exchanges; wherever there is a chance for it a Japanese
always seems to get the preference over a Korean. Railwaymen, policemen,
even the “red caps” at stations, are nearly all Japanese; at such places
the Japanese rickshaw-men are given the best stands, with their Korean
competitors in the background. I was returning one night from Gensan on
the east coast, whence there had just been put on a night train to
Seoul, which for some reason had not been found worthy of carrying a
sleeper. About twenty minutes before train-time I started through the
platform gate, only to be stopped by the gateman, who almost at the same
instant promptly punched the ticket of a little man in kimono and
scraping wooden _getas_ and let him pass. My training in taking a back
seat having been neglected, I pushed past the gateman and followed the
sandal-wearer across to the waiting train. From end to end it was half
full of Japanese passengers, most of them stretched out on two double
seats; and when, just before the train started, Korean passengers were
admitted to the platform, there was little left for them to do but to
squat on the floor or the arm of a seat here and there or stand up all
night.
I have seen a petty Japanese official keep a public autobus waiting for
half an hour while he played with his children or had a last cup of tea
with his neighbors. Railway stations are, with few exceptions, miles
from the towns they serve, though the line may run almost directly
through them. Possibly, as those in authority claim, this is for
protection, though I do not know from what; the disinterested visitor
finds himself agreeing with the Koreans that it is probably done so that
a Japanese town can grow up under more advantageous conditions than the
old Korean city behind it, as has already happened in many cases, and
perhaps to help the Japanese owners of Fords, rickshaws, and hotels. The
Japanese hold up and examine mail, whether of Koreans, missionaries, or
foreigners in general, at the slightest provocation, often, one
suspects, out of mere curiosity. Korean youths who wish to go to school
in America or Europe are almost invariably refused passports. Possibly a
dozen are granted out of a thousand applications, and it often takes as
long as a year to get those. One group of students who applied for
permission to study industries abroad were told to study them in
Chinnampo instead. To appreciate the joke fully one must have seen
Chinnampo. In general the Koreans are virtually prisoners within their
own country, and even if they escape from it they are not always safe.
Koreans whose land has been taken away from them by force have moved to
Manchuria and become Chinese citizens. Even if this prattle of
“self-determination” means nothing so far as nations are concerned,
certainly the right of an individual to choose his own allegiance should
be axiomatic in this day and generation. But the Japanese will not
recognize the Chinese citizenship of a Korean. Having taken the country,
they claim possession of all its people also, irrespective of their
location or personal choice, and send soldiers to round them up on the
foreign soil of Manchuria, forcing the Chinese to hold them in their
jails, bringing them back to Korea for trial, or shooting them on the
spot.
Everywhere the Japanese stick together—another German trait; if they did
not know the ropes and have everything in their favor, including the
official language, say those who know both races well, the Koreans would
outdo them in almost any line. Personally I could not sign so broad a
statement, for though I have seen many indications that the Koreans are
of quicker and sharper intelligence than the Japanese, they have other
weaknesses which largely neutralize this advantage. But the policy in
Korea, even in these improved days, seems never to be humanity and
justice first, but Japan and the Japanese _über alles_—and after that
whatever may conveniently be added. Koreans of standing say that Japan’s
inability to overlook her petty interests for the fulfilment of greater
things is her greatest weakness, as her policy of assimilation, of
trying to make Koreans over into Japanese, which the experience of
Germany in Poland should have taught her not to attempt, is her greatest
mistake. The same dominating instinct which insists that even a railway
porter shall be Japanese, if one applicant among a hundred is of that
race, is manifest in all her political dealings, and this
over-patriotism may prove her final undoing, where a bit less of it
might permit her to continue as an unconquered nation under a single
dynasty for another twenty-five hundred years.
Japan is eager to make Shintoists of the Koreans, to teach them that
ancient cult of the mikado as a direct descendant of the gods which has
been revived and repaired and strengthened during the last half-century
in Japan itself, that his “divine right” may survive even in an age that
is so completely in disagreement with such fallacies. Korean
school-children especially are subjected to this form of propaganda, so
similar to the German school- and pulpit-made _Kultur_ of kaiserly days.
The requirement that their children in government schools shall not
merely salute the banner of the rising sun at frequent intervals, but
shall bow down daily in what is virtually worship, however much the
Japanese may deny it, before a picture of the mikado, is one of the
sorest points with the Koreans. A modicum of intelligence should tell
any people that such methods are out of date and much worse than
useless. The new Shinto shrines on hilltops all over Korea, with their
newly peeled _torii_ before them, look like late and exceedingly weak
rivals of the Christian churches which dot the peninsula.
Until very recently all Japanese officials in Korea, including
_schoolteachers_, wore uniforms and carried swords! Picture to yourself
how much more handy the latter would be than a ferule. But Japanese
influence on the rising generation would be greater if there were not
such a discrepancy in the rights of schooling. With seventeen million
Koreans and less than three hundred and fifty thousand Japanese in
Korea, the 65,654 Korean children who find accommodations in government
schools represent something like one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of the
Korean population, while the 34,183 Japanese youngsters in school are
one tenth of the sons of Nippon in the peninsula. Yet the Government
still hampers to a certain extent private, and especially missionary,
schools. The Japanese have brought many improvements, say the Koreans,
but for whom?
Silk, tobacco, salt, _gin-seng_, to some extent beans, and in a certain
sense prostitution, are government monopolies in Korea. The Japanese
seem to bring immorality and “red lights” and disease wherever they take
root, and to adopt a callous, cynical attitude toward this matter which
marks them as closely related to the French in at least that one point.
Thirty years ago, say missionary doctors, before their war with China
brought the islanders to the peninsula in any great number, the diseases
of prostitution were virtually unknown in Korea; now they are widely
prevalent. As is their custom, the Japanese have established
_yoshiwaras_ in every city of any size, with Korean as well as Japanese
inmates—Chinese also in the zone they control in Manchuria—and while
these are not exactly government owned, the protection accorded them,
the official regulation of them, and the large income in the form of
taxes derived from them makes them virtually so.
A Japanese policeman in spotless white summer uniform and sword,
relieved by a blood-red cap-band which is said to be symbolical, is to
be found in any Korean gathering, even in the utmost corner of the
peninsula. The traveler will probably not be in Korea long before he
sees one or two such officers driving to prison a Korean with his arms
tightly bound with ropes, the loose ends of which serve as reins. This
is an old Oriental custom, but one feels that it could, to advantage,
yield to something a little more modern and reasonable, a bit less
conspicuous. In August, 1919, the police force under an army
lieutenant-general virtually independent of civil authority was replaced
by a gendarmerie or constabulary directly responsible to the new
governor-general, Baron Saito. The latter is widely admitted to be a
superior official, with the best of intentions and a high grade of
ability. But tales of oppression by subordinates, and cruelties by the
police, persist even under his comparatively beneficent rule. The
time-honored excuse that “excesses of police and gendarmes do not have
the approval of higher authorities” is out of date; if higher officials
cannot curb those under them, they are equally to blame. Baron Saito’s
Government seems to recognize this and has changed the formula to “It
cannot be true that the police still beat prisoners, for there is a law
against it.” Definite cases of persecution and torture still turn up
from time to time, but the victims are so cowed that they dare not
report the matter to higher authorities, and a fluent lie by the police
involved settles an investigation, since the word of a Japanese is
always accepted over that of a Korean. An American missionary who had
reported many cases of persecution to the present governor was asked to
bring the next victim in person. But when he suggested to a man who had
sneaked in to see him, badly cut up and mottled in black and blue from
head to foot, that he go and show himself to the governor-general, the
fellow all but fled at the bare suggestion. Word would be sure to get
back to the police of his own province, he insisted, and he would be
manhandled worse than ever when he went home. True, gendarmes who
misbehave are sometimes court-martialed, which sounds to the average
civilian like something dreadful, but those of us with a little military
experience know how often a court martial is a synonym for a
whitewashing, unless it is the sacred army itself which has been
wronged.
[Illustration:
The Korean method of ironing, the rhythmic _rat-a-tat_ of which may be
heard day and night almost anywhere in the peninsula
]
[Illustration:
Winding thread before one of the many little machine-knit stocking
factories in Ping Yang
]
[Illustration:
The graves of Korea cover hundreds of her hillsides with their green
mounds, usually unmarked, but carefully tended by the superstitious
descendants
]
It is not, of course, quite the same to a Korean to be beaten by the
police as it seems to us. Flogging has been practised in Korea as far
back as records go, and it is not unnatural that Japanese gendarmes
should consider this the only sure way of really reaching the intellect
or getting the truth out of some Koreans. But they failed to see that
while men punished in this time-honored way by their fellow-countrymen
might not feel particularly humiliated, might take it almost like a son
from his father, they would deeply resent being so treated by Japanese
aliens, little men whom they have always heartily despised. Certainly
some ugly stories are still afloat, and all indications point to the
probability that the torturing of prisoners—and of witnesses—still goes
on in the secrecy of some police stations, the perhaps real disapproval
of higher authorities notwithstanding. To say that the same thing
sometimes occurs in New York is not to make the practice any less
reprehensible.
Once convicted of a crime, it is another matter; but when a man is
suddenly arrested without warning and imprisoned for weeks, months and
sometimes more than a year without knowing what charge has been made
against him, without being allowed to get a word in or out of prison,
even to notify some one to communicate with his family or see a lawyer,
or to do anything but sit and await the good pleasure of his jailers,
which may include being bambooed for two hours daily, the infliction of
the “water cure,” the clamping of the fingers, the hanging up by the
thumbs, the forced squat, and many other ingenious tortures which are
guaranteed to leave no telltale marks on the body, it is not a sign of
civilization but a remnant of the barbarism from which Japan tries hard
to prove to the world that she has entirely recovered. Once the police
get a confession by such methods there is no going back on it, we were
told, no matter how innocent the sufferer really may be. His case is
turned over at once to the procurator, and only after he has been twice
condemned can he have counsel. The French system of considering the
accused guilty until he proves his innocence prevails, and the chief of
police has often been known to sit behind the judge and virtually to
give him his orders as to what is to be done with the prisoner at the
bar. Nine months in prison merely as a witness has been the experience
of many a Korean Christian. Interpreters, even in important conspiracy
cases, where it may be a matter of life and death, are reputed to
mistranslate testimony in favor of Japanese or in favor of conviction.
There is a classic case of an American missionary arrested during the
independence movement on the charge of “harboring prisoners,” simply
because he did not drive out of his house convert students whom he knew
to be innocent and whom the police were eager to torture. Though he was
ill at the time, he was refused permission to have a bed brought from
his house to the bedless prison, was not allowed even to send word of
his whereabouts to his wife, was kept _incommunicado_ for fifteen days,
during which he was grilled by a haughty Japanese official who spoke to
him only in “low talk,” such as one uses to coolies, and after four
trials his punishment was reduced from one year’s imprisonment to a fine
of a hundred yen.
Perhaps the most repulsive custom of the Japanese police in Korea, from
our Western point of view, is their indifference to domestic privacy.
They march even into school-girls’ dormitories or women’s apartments
with or without provocation; American missionary women traveling in the
interior have often been compelled to admit policemen to their quarters
at inns or in the homes of converts not only after they have prepared
for bed, but several times during the night, merely to answer over and
over again their silly “Who-are-you? How-old-you? Where-you-come-from?
Where-you-go?” questions.
The many reforms that have recently been introduced into Korea, say its
residents, would have been of far more credit to the Japanese if they
had thought of them before rather than after the independence movement
of March, 1919. The handling of that, by the way, was a typical example
of Japanese stupidity. The independence agitation which broke out
simultaneously all over the peninsula was merely a demonstration to
prove to the outside world that the Koreans had not been so completely
and successfully “Japalacked” (as the missionaries, with no unbounded
love for the little brown Prussians of the East, put it) as the Japanese
at the peace conference led the world to suppose. Their city walls had
been torn down; they had no weapons; the native Christians, who were
foremost among the agitators, had refused to have anything to do with
the demonstration until it was agreed that there should be no violence.
If the Japanese had acted with the jovial moderation which their power
over the peninsula made quite possible, the movement would very likely
have been nothing more serious than a kind of lantern procession on a
national scale. There is an anecdote floating about the Far East to the
effect that half a dozen British “Tommies,” strolling down the street of
a city in India, were met by a mob shouting the Hindu version of “Long
live Gandhi!” They neither raced back to the barracks for their rifles
nor fell upon the crowd with such weapons as they could snatch up; they
merely began shouting with the natives, “Long live Gandhi!” Within five
minutes the demonstration had broken up in peals of laughter at the
antics of the soldiers and their ludicrous Hindustani accent. Whether it
is true or not, the story illustrates a great weakness of the Japanese.
Almost no nation is so devoid of a sense of humor, as we use the phrase;
that is, they are wholly incapable of permitting anything but the
greatest solemnity of word or deed concerning their persons, their
country, or their “sacred” institutions.
Instead of treating the “Mansei” movement as more or less of a joke,
therefore, they acted with incredible childishness, as well as quite
unnecessary brutality. Groups of unarmed Koreans gathered on hills
overlooking the towns, shouted “Mansei!”—which is merely the Korean form
of the Japanese “Banzai!” or “Ten Thousand Years!” and means something
like “Long live Korea!”—then scattered. The silly police ran hither and
thither, distracted. The honor of their nation, the luster of their
military caste, the glory of their god-descended ruler might have been
at stake. They arrested sixty school-boys eight years of age because
some one among them had shouted the dreadful word, and they kept them at
the police station until ten o’clock at night. A high official quizzed a
roomful of little girls with such questions as how they could expect
liberty, and where they would get money to run the Government, if they
had it. When they answered, woman-like, “Oh, we’d get it,” the Japanese
on the platform foamed at the mouth and devised ingenious ways of
punishing the tots for their temerity. Brutalities like ours in Haiti,
and worse, were perpetrated on the population. Students were beaten if
they admitted they attended mission schools. They were asked at ferry
stations and other points of concentration whether they were Christians,
and if they replied in the affirmative they were cut with swords and
otherwise mishandled by soldiers and police. If they denied the
allegation, even though they were known to be converts, they were not
abused, the idea seeming to be to get them to apostatize. Prisoners were
tied together and driven on forced marches of sometimes a hundred miles,
sleeping on plank floors full of cracks, with no food whatever on
examination-day (otherwise known as “torture-day”). Great gangs were
marched into Ping Yang from the country roundabout, many of them
virtually unable to walk, and with carts of dead ones behind. Women who
had shouted “Mansei!” were taken to police stations, stripped, and
marched around while the police amused themselves by burning them with
cigarettes. Whether or not they were violated, they were subjected to
every other form of indignity. The Japanese claim that “not a few
policemen and their families in isolated stations were ruthlessly
massacred,” and that they were therefore provoked to harsh measures. But
they neglect to give the exact chronology of the affair, which indicates
that they were the first to adopt harsh measures, and that Korean
violence was in retaliation for their unnecessarily stern suppression of
what probably would have remained a bloodless demonstration. Thus all
the complaints, dissatisfactions, and grievances that had been repressed
within the breasts of the people of Cho-sen for ten long years broke out
at last like the cataract through a broken dike.
Those not friendly to them say that the Japanese police are cowardly as
well as bullies, citing such examples as a group of Americans being
mobbed only a few yards from one of the innumerable police stations in
Seoul during our stay there, without a single white uniform appearing on
the scene. Since the establishment of civil government some Koreans have
been made gendarmes and otherwise given positions of authority, but as
so often happens in such cases, many of them are more cruel to their
fellow-nationals, and more itching with curiosity as to the doings of
foreigners, than the Japanese themselves. Up to the time of the “Mansei”
movement the Japanese scorned to study Korean and tried to force the
Koreans to learn Japanese instead, again aping the Germans in Poland.
But they have learned the disadvantages of using Korean interpreters and
depending on native stool-pigeons for information, so that now they
offer five yen a month in addition to the regular salary of those who
have a workable knowledge of the native tongue.
The Japanese learned considerable from the uprising of 1919, but they
still have something to learn. There are officials yet who advocate
fines and flogging for Koreans who refuse to hoist the flag of Japan on
national holidays. A modicum of common sense should teach any people
that a national flag is a symbol of patriotism the display of which
should be only an expression of free will, that patriotism can never be
forced into the hearts of a people, and that any false show of it is
much worse than worthless. Even shops which close as a sign of protest
against certain Japanese doings are compelled by the police to open
their doors. When the warship _Mutsu_ anchored in the harbor of
Chemulpo, the port for Seoul, every visitor who went on board was
compelled to salute the common sailor on sentry duty at the gang-plank,
who barked like an enraged bulldog at any one who did not perform the
ceremony with the deepest solemnity. Until they cure themselves, or are
cured, of this ridiculously Prussian point of view on matters pertaining
to their national life naturally the Japanese will not be able to see
that it is silly to speak of the “wickedness” of trying to change, or
even of talking of changing, a given form of government, that as a
matter of fact any form of government is no more sacred than an old pair
of shoes that has served the wearer moderately well.
We of the West should not forget, however, that the “white peril” has
been a much more actual thing to the Japanese than the “yellow peril”
ever was to us. Korea was not only a convenient spring-board for Russia
and the whole white world behind her, but it was a greater source of
danger to Japanese health than Cuba in its most yellow-feverish days
ever was to us. Old residents paint a distressing picture of
pre-Japanese Seoul—narrow streets plowed up into bullock-cart ruts, no
general means of transportation except one’s own feet, however deep the
mud, corpses of those dying of cholera left before any “rich” man’s
house, forcing him to bury them. The Korean royal family was “liberally
provided for” and left in possession of their palaces and their titles
in perpetuity on condition that they would not interfere in any way with
the new Government or the people of the peninsula. The sop of titles of
nobility was thrown to influential Koreans who were likely to make
trouble, and seventy-six new peers stepped forth from their mud huts.
The Japanese claim that they spend ten million dollars a year on the
occupation of Korea, that with its need of schools, roads, trees,
sanitation, and many other things the peninsula is a great burden to
them. “Though it is treason to say so now,” a high-placed Japanese in
Seoul assured me, “Korea will eventually get her independence, as soon
as she can stand on her own feet and protect herself—and us—from the
north.” Possibly this was mere prattle meant to throw me off the scent,
but I have met some Japanese intelligent enough sincerely to believe in
this eventual solution.
The American and European merchants in Korea think that the Japanese did
on the whole better than any one else could have done in handling the
situation, and that the Koreans cannot possibly govern themselves. So,
for that matter, do most of the missionaries. Russia would have forced
the Greek church upon the people, they say, but would have left the
lowest form of inefficient and unsanitary burlesque on government. They
would virtually have encouraged the persistence of ignorance and filth
that made the Hermit Kingdom in every sense a stench to the nostrils of
the world and a land of but two classes of people, the robbers and the
robbed. “If Japan were to say to us to-morrow, ‘Here’s your country; run
it yourselves,’” said a man who was trained to become prime minister
under the old régime, “there are not bright men enough in it to form a
cabinet.” The people have sometimes been made to suffer, the merchants
go on, in such matters, for instance, as the taking of their land to
build roads—for in old Korea as in China to-day highways were mere
trespassers on private domain; but on the whole Japan has been no
rougher than the United States or England in the countries they have
taken over.
The agitation of Koreans for independence, the foreign laymen in the
peninsula claim, emanates from self-seekers in foreign lands, and from
the young students of mission schools, “especially American mission
schools”; and the two “provisional governments,” one in the United
States, and one, which has been in existence since the annexation, in
Shanghai, do not at all represent the wishes of the Korean people as a
whole. As it is, they are ground between the two millstones of the
Japanese on the spot and these exiled governments, which send agents to
make life miserable for those who fear one or both of them may some day
come into power. Even the old politicians and office-holders are
content, if we are to believe the men of commerce, now that even the
Japanese have discovered that few military chiefs are of a type to make
successful colonial governors, and that their subordinates, especially
of the lower ranks, are almost always tactless, to say the least. But
business men have a tendency the world over to praise anything that
tends to keep “business as usual,” and one will probably come nearest
the truth by striking a balance between their impressions and those of
the missionaries, crediting the latter with somewhat more sincere,
because less self-seeking, motives.
Whatever his personal opinion on the usefulness of foreign missions, no
one with his eyes half open can set foot in Cho-sen without being
impressed by the Christian influence, or at least by the number of
missionaries, converts, and churches. He may be highly amused at the
many subdivisions of that faith, by reason not merely of minor matters
of creed and national lines but of such political cleavages as that
caused by our Civil War, so nearly obliterated at home, which bewilder
the natives like a countryman in a department-store with the wide
choices of salvation offered them by—to mention only some of the
American varieties—the “Northern” Presbyterians and the “Southern”
Presbyterians, the “Northern” and the “Southern” Methodists, the Kansas
Baptists and the Oklahoma High Rollers, for all I know, all guaranteed
to give equal satisfaction. But the very intensity with which native
converts regard these arbitrary lines of division, much slighter among
the missionaries themselves, and the care which “Bible women” and
country pastors take to keep their charges from wandering into any
adjoining heretical sheepfold, is an evidence of the genuineness of
their new beliefs.
Whether or not Christianity is the one and only true faith, it seems to
be an established fact that it thrives under persecution. Protestant
mission work began in China in 1808, in Japan in 1859, but not until
about 1888 in Korea; yet there is to-day only a scattering of native
Christians in the two former countries as compared with the hordes of
them in Korea. Many towns, even Ping Yang, second city of the peninsula,
are almost more Christian than “pagan”; and the missionary boast that
Korea will be a Christian land within a generation or two does not sound
so wild as many another statement that drifts to the ear of the
naturally skeptical wanderer. There is some evidence to show that this
rapid progress is considerably due to those very Japanese who are least
eager for the Christian faith to spread. The law of Japan and Korea
grants absolute freedom of religious belief and practice, but even the
passing layman can plainly detect something very close to persecution of
Christians by some of the Japanese authorities in the peninsula, though
it be only unconscious and unintentional, which it probably is not.
While the Catholics have been there much longer, and have often carried
things with a high hand, it is the Protestants in particular, and
especially the American missionaries, who seem to have won most of the
Japanese ill will. This I believe to be almost more because of the fact
that they are Americans than because they are missionaries. As Americans
they just naturally resent the lack of human liberty, of
“self-determination,” to use the catchword of the hour, which Japanese
rule in Korea means. The opposite point of view is bred in their bones.
Though they never opened their lips on the subject, their mere
unconscious attitude, their negative lack of approval of the existing
state of things politically, cannot but seem to the Koreans an approval
of their own opposition to the Japanese. Obviously, the study of
American history, even of American literature, in the mission schools
adds to the discontent of young Koreans with the present status of what
was once their own country, even though the teachers lean over backward
in the effort not to mix academic and political matters. In fact, while
the missionaries might deny it, it may be that the Koreans are rallying
in increasing numbers about the American sponsored churches as much
under the mistaken impression that the Americans are secretly
sympathetic to the throwing off of the alien yoke, even by violence if
necessary, as from the conviction that the American brands of salvation
are the only sure passwords at the celestial gates.
At any rate, the Japanese seem to have concluded that American
missionaries were behind the independence movement of 1919, and that
they are still not to be entirely trusted. Now, I am as certain as I am
of anything in this uncertain world that not a single American
missionary was in the conspiracy of the “Mansei” demonstration. A very
few may have known something about it, at least have felt in the air
that something was coming; but it was no business of theirs to turn
tattletales and run to warn a Government which had usurped since most of
them came to Korea and had not treated them with any notable kindness,
besides having what should have been an ample supply of its own spies to
pick up such information. But the Japanese have not our way of thinking.
They are ready enough to have the missionaries render unto Cæsar what
belongs to him by keeping out of politics, but at the same time they
seem to expect them to lend a hand to the extent of passing on to the
authorities any hints or rumors that may be of use to them.
However, the independence demonstration and the unwise acts it brought
in its train have trailed off into history. The more intelligent
Japanese officials seem to have seen the light and acquitted the
American missionaries of any active and conscious part in it, and the
new governor-general and his immediate aids even sometimes call them
into conference to get their point of view on subjects in which they are
involved. But there is still an undercurrent of something akin to
persecution of the American churches. As in the case of the persistent
rumors of police floggings in spite of the new law forbidding them, it
is impossible to make certain whether this is due to deliberate
disobedience of orders by recalcitrant subordinates, to secret
instructions at variance with those made public, or to pure stupidity,
of which the Japanese have their liberal quota. In every mission town
there is a detective in charge of matters pertaining to missionaries. He
attends all services, comes hotfooting it whenever a foreigner stops
even for lunch at a mission, demanding information concerning him back
to the _n_th degree of absurdity, asks the future plans of the church
almost daily, and other stupid and impertinent questions. In some
districts the police still literally hound the church—demand lists of
all contributors, send spies to stand at the church door and take note
of every Korean who enters, burst noisily in during prayer, order new
women converts not to attend services. Even the missionaries strike one
as being rather afraid of the police, though this may merely be due to
their strenuous efforts to avoid giving further offense and to come more
than half-way toward established friendship with the political
authorities; it can easily be imagined how native pastors and the simple
converts are affected by a brutal attitude.
[Illustration:
A chicken peddler in Seoul
]
[Illustration:
A full load
]
[Illustration:
The plowman homeward wends his weary way—in Korean fashion, always
carrying the plow and driving his unburdened ox or bull before him;
one of the most common sights of Korea
]
[Illustration:
The biblical “watch-tower in a cucumber patch” is in evidence all over
Korea in the summer, when crops begin to ripen. Whole families often
sleep in them during this season, when they spring up all over the
country, and often afford the only cool breeze
]
Christian students in government schools often report that they have
secretly been ordered to quit the church. There seems to be little doubt
that the Japanese foster the student strikes which are increasingly
becoming the bane of mission schools, now with demands for a Korean
principal in place of an American who has grown gray in that position,
now that no teacher be hired who has not been educated in Japan or
Korea, or that there shall be no studying of the Bible in school—almost
prima facie evidence of Japanese influence. All this cuts both ways in
separating the Koreans and the foreigners. When the strikes reach the
point of demanding that laboratory or library equipment be improved,
notwithstanding that every tack in the school wall is due to American
charity toward the strikers, the ordinary human being finds himself
wishing that the missionaries would forget their unnatural patience and
boot the strikers down the front steps. Permits are required for
everything under the sun—to be pastor, to build a new church, even to
solicit contributions to mission hospitals. The Japanese meddle with
hospitals, schools, and churches in ways which even they could not
possibly believe are excusable. The missionaries have to submit to their
dictation as to curriculum; they even have to make their school year
conform to the Japanese custom and teach in July. Perhaps the greatest
hardship the missionaries have to endure is the constant dread that
their sick children will be carried off to Japanese isolation wards, on
the pretext that contagious diseases cannot be properly isolated in
mission hospitals, and there virtually killed by being given only
Japanese food, lack of beds, and treatment, while the parents may not
even be allowed to see them.
All books by foreigners must be fully _printed_ before being submitted
to the police censor, who will not look at manuscript. Three days before
publication two copies of the finished book must be in his hands, and if
_any_ of the contents is considered objectionable the whole edition is
confiscated. Christian schools are often called out to meet officials on
Sunday, or teacher’s examinations are given on that day with a frequency
that could scarcely be coincidence. The requirement that all children in
government schools shall bow down before a picture of the mikado in an
attitude of worship is of course a constant thorn in the side of the
Christians. The authorities claim that American mission students have no
discipline, which is probably true from the Japanese point of view, in
that they are not told just what they should think and do on every
possible subject and occasion. In their published maps of Korean towns
the Japanese rarely give any signs of the existence of Christian
establishments, though these are often many years old and the most
prominent institutions in the place. On the other hand, when their
travels take them out of their own orbit the missionaries almost always
go to Korean hotels instead of patronizing the foreign ones under
Japanese management, but old custom and the high prices of the latter
could easily account for this without including a suggestion of pique.
Personally I came to the conclusion that, while both are in evidence, it
is the thick-headedness of the rank-and-file Japanese more than
deliberate persecution which causes the continued friction between the
two peoples who are doing the most for the regeneration of Korea. I
might cite a typical case in point. Over near Gensan on the east coast
the missionaries have a private summer resort, half a hundred houses and
a beach, all enclosed within purchased grounds. But as the Japanese are
very insistent in matters which they conceive to involve the equality of
their race to the rest of the world, they refuse to let the missionaries
keep the townspeople off their beach. Now, the bathing demeanor of the
Japanese, innocent and proper though it may be to those who like it, is
decidedly not suited to a place where American women and children come
to spend their summers. So by dint of coaxing and explaining their own
peculiar point of view, the Americans got the authorities at Gensan to
post a notice that no one should bathe on the missionary beach unless
arrayed in proper swimming costume. The Japanese of course are
notoriously law-abiding. One afternoon when I found time to join my
family on that beach a big limousine stood at the edge of the sand, and
several dignified middle-aged men who might have been bankers or lawyers
from the city were disporting themselves in perfectly respectable
bathing-suits. But when I chanced to glance about a little later, one of
them stood within ten feet of us, stripped stark naked as he calmly and
leisurely changed from swimming to street costume, and two others were
in the act of disrobing for the same purpose. I feel sure that they had
no intention whatever of being offensive toward the dozen or more
American women about them; probably their limited minds really thought
that they were complying with both the letter and the spirit of the
posted order and the desires of those who inspired it by wearing bathing
costumes while in the water, and getting into and out of them on the
open beach. When I addressed them with an unmissionary vehemence that
might have landed me in a police station if they had chosen to make the
most of it, they apologized hastily for the unwitting offense and
hurried off to the privacy of the limousine. The Japanese in Korea are
spending large sums in the effort to make certain of the beaches of the
peninsula popular with foreigners, and quite likely some of these
bankerly-looking gentlemen were involved in the scheme; but none of them
still have any clear conception, probably, of why no beach can ever be
popular with foreigners as long as Japanese also have the right of
admission to it.
Missionaries after all are only human beings, as they themselves are the
first to admit, and we do not expect the supernatural of them even in
such a matter as meekly accepting the abuse of what they more or less
regard as a usurping and alien political power over a people the
benefiting of whom they consider their life-work. Many of the Americans
in the mission field have been in Korea far longer than the Japanese.
Some have lived there so long, according to those foreigners of another
class who see them as dangers to their precious “business as usual,”
that “they think they own the country and can countenance no changes in
it, not even improvements. They used to do exactly as they liked, and
they hate the least suggestion of coercion.” We should remember that the
missionaries had the advantages of extraterritoriality in Korea before
the Japanese came, and they cannot but resent the loss of it, the
submitting to alien rulers whose ideas of everything, from housing to
justice, are so widely different from their own. Moreover, though they
readily admit that the Japanese are doing many things for the good of
the peninsula, they see them primarily as men with an ax to grind.
It would be strange, if it were not long since commonplace, to see how
sharp national lines remain even among men who think they are working
above nationalities, how completely even men of strong ideals succumb to
their environment. The American missionaries in Japan say that there is
some reason for the Japanese to be suspicious of the American
missionaries in Korea. They agree with the officials there, who contend
that those destined for mission work in the Korean field should first
have a year in Japan, that they may judge more fairly the Japanese
national point of view. Even those in Korea, after ten to forty years’
residence there, cannot agree on many of the points involved, so how can
a mere passer-by be expected to get at the exact truth of the matter? He
can merely decide that there is some reason on both sides, with perhaps
a private opinion as to which one is most inclined to tamper with the
scales, and let it go at that. Friction is gradually decreasing, as the
Japanese and Americans become more able to talk together—generally in
Korean; and as there is no doubt that Japan has the good of Cho-sen and
its people at heart—as an integral part of the Japanese Empire—constant
improvement may confidently be expected.