Before Japan acquired the country, large numbers of Koreans had adopted Christianity. Under the influence of the teachers from America, they became clean in person, they brought their women out from the "anpang" (zenana) into the light of day, and they absorbed Western ideas and ideals. The mission schools taught modern history, with its tales of the heroes and heroines of liberty, women like Joan of Arc, men like Hampden and George Washington. And the missionaries circulated and taught the Bible—the most dynamic and disturbing book in the world. When a people saturated in the Bible comes into touch with tyranny, either one of two things happens, the people are exterminated or tyranny ceases.
The Japanese realized their danger. They tried, in vain, to bring the Churches under Japanese control. They confiscated or forbade missionary textbooks, substituting their own. Failing to win the support of the Christians, they instituted a widespread persecution of the Christian leaders of the north. Many were arrested and tortured on charges which the Japanese Courts themselves afterwards found to be false. The Koreans endured until they could endure no more. Not the Christians alone, but men of all faiths and all classes acted as one. The story of their great protest, of what led up to it, and the way in which it was met, is told in this book.
To the outsider, one of the most repulsive features of the Japanese method of government of Korea is the wholesale torture of untried prisoners, particularly political prisoners. Were this torture an isolated occurrence, I would not mention it. There are always occasional men who, invested with authority and not properly controlled, abuse their position. But here torture is employed in many centres and on thousands of people. The Imperial Japanese Government, while enacting paper regulations against the employment of torture, in effect condones it. When details of the inhuman treatment of Christian Korean prisoners have been given in open court, and the victims have been found innocent, the higher authorities have taken no steps to bring the torturers to justice.
The forms of torture freely employed include, among others:—
1. The stripping, beating, kicking, flogging, and outraging of schoolgirls and young women.
2. Flogging schoolboys to death.
3. Burning—the burning of young girls by pressing lighted cigarettes against their tender parts, and the burning of men, women and children by searing their bodies with hot irons.
4. Stringing men up by their thumbs, beating them with bamboos and iron rods until unconscious, restoring them and repeating the process, sometimes several times in one day, sometimes until death.
5. Contraction—tying men up in such fashion as to cause intense suffering.
6. Confinement for long periods under torturing conditions, as, e.g., where men and women are packed so tightly in a room that they cannot lie or sit down for days at a stretch.