KOREA OR CHOSEN
Though her specialty is islands, Japan now has a large slice of the
continent of Asia in her empire. During her war with Russia she found
that the peninsula we usually call Korea was a “convenient springboard”
from which her enemies could jump upon old Japan. Also the Koreans, who
were formerly a part of the great Chinese Empire, had a very corrupt
government. So the Japanese decided that it would be safer for
themselves, and perhaps better for the Koreans, if they took charge of
the peninsula. First they called it a “protectorate,” and left the old
Korean Emperor on his throne in Seoul, requiring him to reform his
government so as to be more like their own. But in 1910 the Emperor was
deposed and the Japanese made Korea a part of their own empire, with a
Japanese governor-general as the chief ruler.
From Shimonoseki, at the western end of the largest Japanese island, it
was a comfortable one-night trip by a big Japanese steamer across to
Fusan, at the southern end of Korea. We found this latest addition to
the empire very different from the rest of Japan. The Koreans in some
ways resemble the Japanese and in others the Chinese, yet they are
enough different from either to be quickly recognized. Moreover, their
costumes and customs and indeed the landscape of their peninsula are
quite new to one who has been traveling through Japan.
American Trains in a Far-away Land
Instead of the little Japanese trains with long upholstered seats on
either side of the cars, Korea has regular American trains. Hearing the
loud whistle of a locomotive made in Philadelphia, so different from the
screeching little engines of Japan proper, we could almost imagine
ourselves back home again. But the people in the train, and the scenes
that raced past the windows, were not a bit American. Korea is a land of
villages that look like clusters of great mushrooms, for their roofs are
thatched with rice straw. There are a few cities, and in them many
buildings have tile roofs and resemble the houses of China. The
continental part of the Japanese Empire, almost as large as its biggest
island, yet only about half as large as our similar peninsula of
Florida, has a very much greater population. Most Koreans are peasants
living in villages near their fields; so you can understand why those
mushroom villages are so numerous.
It was June now, and the sun beat down from a sky without the least
little cloud in it, upon almost endless rice fields. The Koreans grow
cotton and tobacco also, and some wheat, millet, and barley in the
northern part of their peninsula. But we might have fancied, seeing
these fields hour after hour, that they grew nothing but rice. If we
could have seen the peasants eating their dinners we might have formed
the same impression, for the great mass of the people eat very little
except rice.
Countryside and City
There were almost no trees to break the sun-flooded rice lands. One of
the weaknesses of the old Korean Government was that it let the people
cut down all the trees. Knowing that the loss of forests means that
there will be both droughts and floods, the Japanese protected theirs,
so that they not only have much finer scenery than either Korea or China
but they possess the water supply so necessary for growing food. In
Formosa they even replant camphor trees to take the place of those they
cut down. In Korea the Japanese have started tree nurseries, like those
of Germany, and in time they hope to have the peninsula well forested
again.
One thing about Korea that strikes every traveler from America or Europe
is the scarcity of real roads. Before the Japanese came, there were only
trails in most parts of the peninsula, so that travelers had to go on
foot or horseback, and produce on animals’ or men’s backs or on
wheelbarrows. Now the Japanese are building modern roads, but they are
not very good road-builders, and floods in a treeless country quickly
fill the rivers and tear out the bridges. We did not see an automobile
all day long, and very few other vehicles. Later I found that Fords
sometimes run to towns at a distance from the railway. But even those
often have hard work getting over the rough earth roads, and have to be
ferried across rivers where bridges have been washed out or have never
existed.
[Illustration:
Two Korean salesmen on the streets of Seoul. The one on the left has a
load of firewood (small branches of evergreen trees), which he has
brought to the market-square on the back of his patient bull. The
peddler on the right has chickens to sell. The fowls are carried in
a network frame or cage which has legs so that it may be set down
when a customer is found. The roosters crow as if they enjoyed the
ride.
]
Seoul, the Capital City
[Illustration:
A Japanese woman (in front) and a Korean woman (behind) in the streets
of Seoul show rather different costumes.
]
We rode ten hours on our American train, reaching Seoul, the capital of
Korea, only as the sun set. Yet this city is in the middle of the
country, and it takes even longer by train to get to the northern
boundary. Once Seoul had a great wall all around it, like the cities of
China. But the Japanese do not believe in city walls. They know those
old walls that were once so useful in warfare are of no use whatever
against the great guns of to-day. Moreover, they say the Koreans cannot
fight unless behind walls, and naturally they would not want their new
subjects to have any advantage in case of a possible attempt to drive
the Japanese out of the peninsula. So the picturesque walls of old Seoul
have all been torn down. Some of the great ornamental gates have been
left, but only as monuments.
Those who came to Seoul fifteen or twenty years ago found the streets
very narrow, and deep either in mud or in dust, depending on the
weather. Even rich people went about the city on foot or on horseback,
or perhaps in sedan-chairs, and it took them hours to get from one part
of town to another. Some of these quaint little streets are still left;
but there are many wide paved streets now, with automobiles, and
electric street cars running from one end of town to the other.
The Koreans like to sleep during the hottest part of the day in summer,
and they can sleep almost anywhere, with the ground as a bed and a brick
as a pillow. When the street cars first came, Koreans who wanted a nap
thought the high rails made a fine pillow, and some of them were killed
by the cars. All that is changed now, and Seoul is a busy and quite a
modern city.
[Illustration:
Beneath this famous old kiosk of Seoul, with the lines of monkeys in
tile running along its four ridge-poles, there is a monument on a
great stone turtle. The turtle, which means long life to Koreans and
Chinese, is often seen as a monument or as the pedestal of a carved
slab of granite.
]
Yet one still finds much that is picturesque in the capital. The palaces
of the former rulers, where the deposed Emperor (who has since died)
lived even after the Japanese took his power away from him, are very
gaudy buildings, with flaring tiled roofs, inside high walls with
ornamental wooden gates. Quaint old temples filled with statues of gods
and demons in all the colors of the rainbow still peer out from among
the low houses and from groves on the surrounding hillsides. But the big
modern government buildings of the Japanese overshadow the old palaces,
and when you climb a hill and look down upon Seoul you will be much less
likely to see the temples than the bulking red brick churches built by
Christian missionaries. The mythological stone animals of the old Korean
city are not nearly so conspicuous as the big new wheel-shaped prison
built by the Japanese, and the once sacred Temple of Heaven is now an
ice-cream pavilion in the garden of the best Japanese hotel!
Funeral Customs
Sometimes we heard in the streets those weird sounds which the Koreans
think are music, and looked out to see a funeral passing. The Korean
hearse has no wheels but is carried on men’s shoulders. Although some of
the mourners now may ride in rickshaws, most of the people behind the
hearse are on foot. At least half of them are men and boys hired to
carry the many strange things that must go in a Korean funeral
procession. They are dressed in red and green and other gaily-colored
garments, sometimes rather worn and dirty, which belong to the director
of the funeral rather than to those who are wearing them.
Once I followed one of these queer funerals out over the hills. When it
had left the city it moved more and more slowly. Some of the mourners
and other followers dropped out and went back home. Far out among the
rice fields the rest of the procession sat down for a while to rest, and
then went on again, the queer music still howling and squeaking and
banging. In former days the Koreans buried their dead wherever the “wise
men” who make that their business told them to, so that the hills about
Seoul are covered for miles and miles with little green knolls. But now
the Japanese allow them to bury only in certain places, and are inducing
some to follow the old Buddhist custom of burning corpses. Many of these
processions end at an ugly brick building with a tall chimney, looking
like a little factory lost among the green hills. There the bodies are
cremated.
Korean hearses are made so that they can be taken apart. After each
funeral, those in the procession wander back to Seoul by short-cuts over
the high hills, the pallbearers each carrying a part of the bier, and
laughing, chatting, and smoking their little pipes. In among the hills
there are little monasteries, where Korean Buddhist monks with shaven
heads lead rather an idle existence, though they pray often before their
gaudy wooden and plaster gods. Here and there is a royal tomb, quite
different from the simple grass-covered and often unmarked graves of
ordinary people. There was one of these royal tombs on the trail we
sometimes followed from the city to the home of the missionaries with
whom we lived beyond the hills. First, behind a wooden memorial arch,
there was a great cut-stone platform with two or three stone steps
leading up to it. Part of this was covered by a small wooden temple
topheavy with its great tile roof. It is here that the spirit of the
little dead prince who is buried farther back is supposed to make its
home. But we could see, through the torn paper panes that took the place
of glass in the doors and windows of the temple, that there was nothing
but a dirty bare floor inside.
Higher up on the grassy hill, a hundred yards from the temple, was the
green mound of the grave itself. It was several times as large as the
grave mounds of ordinary Koreans. There was a high gravestone, with a
few words in Chinese characters and a top that looked like a roof, or a
hat. Around the grave stood the guardians of the dead prince, all badly
made of stone. There were two horses, two sheep, two queer things
supposed to be lions, and several other pairs of protectors. The most
imposing and best made were two stone mandarins, or high officials, in
long robes and high headdresses, who gazed kindly at the grave of the
little prince, without ever taking their eyes off it from one year’s end
to another.
[Illustration:
Such strange stone figures as these guard a royal grave in Korea.
]
Back of the grave was a semicircular brick wall, such as the Koreans
think protects the dead against evil spirits coming from the north; and
surrounding the place was an old pine forest, with a caretaker’s house
set in the edge of it. The Koreans, who have destroyed their trees
nearly everywhere else, are very careful of the sacred groves.