In Korea with Marquis Ito

by George Trumbull Ladd

Now, plainly, all this was not at all to the point of the interest weighing upon the minds of my auditors. Suddenly, and in a startling manner, the real cause of the three formal visits from as many different deputations, made itself known. With lips white and trembling, the same theological student who had been present at each visit, drew from his sleeve an envelope, and from the envelope a document printed in mixed Chinese and Korean, the purport of which he began to explain to my interpreter in a highly excited and rhetorical way. This document purported to be an elaborate statement of no fewer than forty-eight reasons why Japan should annex Korea and reduce its Emperor to the grade of a peer of Japan. “Where did this remarkable pronunciamento come from?” was, of course, my first inquiry. Why, from Seoul, from the Court; but it was originally a production of the Japanese Government which, fortunately, had been discovered in time and which was now officially sent out in order to warn all Korean patriots against this outrageous plot concocted by the Japanese!

The situation was obviously serious, if not threatening. On inquiry it was soon disclosed that for two days and nights the entire native city of Pyeng-yang had been in such a state of excitement as is not easily made credible to citizens of a country accustomed to the exercise of sound political sense and self-control. No business had been done, no buying or selling, on the last market day. All night long the men and women of the city had been sleepless and engaged in wailing and beating the ground and the floor of their houses with their heads. Not a few of the worst classes—including, I fear, some professing Christians—had been working themselves and others up to threats of violence and of murder.

The silliness of mind, the almost hopeless and incurable credulity and absence of sound judgment which characterizes, with exceedingly few exceptions, the political views and actions of even the official and educated classes in Korea, was the impression made upon me by this, as by all my experiences during my stay in the land. I assured these visitors, however, that there could be no doubt about this document being a forgery—as, indeed, it turned out to be. Marquis Ito and the Japanese Government had no such immediate intention; and, indeed, if the Resident-General entertained the thought, he surely was not foolish enough to proceed in any such way. Such childish behavior on their own part, I added, was very discouraging to their friends. What could be done by others for a country where the men who should be leaders behaved habitually in a so unmanly way? Let them quiet themselves, tell their Governor what I had said, and bid him use all his authority to quiet their fellow-citizens. This advice was complied with, as the event showed; the Korean governor was reassured and promised to unite his influence with that of the Christian forces to secure a return of the populace to their normal quiet. It was gratifying afterwards to have this official’s expression of gratitude for what was then done to assist in the peace-promoting administration of his office.

Dr. Noble, at once upon the departure of this committee, gave orders that the church bell should be rung to assemble the Christian community; and in such manner as to indicate to them that they were called together to hear “good news.” An hour later, when we were going down the hill to dine with the Japanese Resident, the people had not yet assembled; but on our return in the evening they were departing to their homes, quieted by two hours of opportunity to express their excited feeling in the Korean fashion of wailing, sobbing, and beating their foreheads upon the mats—assisted by the comforting and reassuring words of those to whom they looked as having knowledge and authority. It afterward transpired[4] that a young Korean, one An Chung-ho, who had become by foreign residence infected, rather than instructed, with certain so-called “modern ideas,” had busied himself, as the agent of the seditious intriguers at Seoul, in distributing this forged document and in haranguing the people with a view to excite a popular uprising against the Japanese. It is needless to say that the document itself was not printed in Japan. But the next morning’s sunlight saw the mist and the threatening storm-cloud cleared away.

It was during this visit to Pyeng-yang that I saw something of the remarkable features of the religious movement which was most intense there, but which spread, during the winter of 1906-’07, widely over Korea. The “revival” began—and, indeed, as regards its principal immediate results, it consisted largely—in the irresistible tendency to confession, contrition, and prayer for forgiveness, among Christians themselves. The confessions, while in general they embraced such familiar topics as pride, envy, unfaithfulness, and coldness in the Christian life, very naturally soon revealed the characteristic vices and weaknesses of the Korean character. Taken at their own estimate, and making all reasonable allowances for the exaggerations of temporary excitement, they made obvious the fact that lying, stealing, cheating, and impurity, had been nearly universal in the hitherto existing Christian communities of Korea. In many cases these “spiritual exercises” were accompanied by the most violent physical demonstrations, such as sobbing, wailing, beating the forehead on the floor, and even falling down unconscious and frothing at the mouth.

A more graphic picture of these religious meetings can perhaps be obtained by a brief description of one which I attended, where, however, the demonstrations were all of a relatively mild order. This was the evening gathering of the theological students on a day during the whole of which they had been holding a series of similar gatherings. As we arrived in front of the building in which the meeting was held, there pierced the silent night air a voice of wailing rather than of articulate speaking, in a high-pitched key and with extreme rapidity of utterance. On entering, some sixty Korean men appeared, seated on the floor with their heads bowed in their hands; three or four missionaries were occupying a bench which ran across one end of the room. At the other end stood one of the students swaying back and forth; it was his confession of sin that we had heard while still outside. Precisely what the confession was, there was no opportunity to learn; for after speaking a few sentences more, with ever increasing rapidity and shrillness of tone, the speaker fell to the floor sobbing and moaning convulsively and began beating the mats with fists and with forehead. One of the missionaries stepped carefully between the stooping bodies of his comrades, found his way to the prostrate sinner, and by words and gentle blows upon the back attempted to revive and comfort him.

Then followed a series of similar confessions, interspersed with prayers for forgiveness, none of which, however, attained the same degree of vehemence and physical excess. The substance of sins confessed by these Korean students of divinity was most illuminating. The next penitent wished it to be known that he had broken all the commandments; although it appeared that this far limit had been reached before his profession of Christianity, and that he had been guilty of murder rather in the spirit than in fact. Various following narratives of experience, made with varying degrees of emotional excitement, included forms of wrong-doing common to most church members in all countries, such as pride, envy, deceit, infidelity, and impurity of thought, if not of life. But the climax was fairly reached when one man of early middle-age arose, and in a markedly unemotional way asserted that, although he had formerly resisted all efforts to make him tell the truth as to his real manner of living, he now felt that the time had come when this painful duty could no longer be postponed. How to repent, however, he did not know. The story which was told in cold-blooded fashion was, briefly, as follows: Before professing Christian conversion he had been a wild fellow, and among other crimes had twice set fire to the houses of his neighbors. After profession of conversion he had been employed as a colporteur. In this connection he had thrown away or destroyed the books he was paid to distribute, had told his employer that robbers had attacked him and stolen them, and thus had collected his full salary. Still later he had renounced all pretence of Christianity and had himself become a robber. His life as a theological student up to the present time had been characterized by pride, envy, and constant secret hatred of those of his fellow-students who had surpassed him in their studies.

Among the most significant of the confessions were those of bitter hatred of the Japanese, and even of murderous thoughts and plans toward them. These wholesome self-accusations were in several instances followed by earnest and pathetic petitions—not only for forgiveness of themselves, but for the Divine blessing upon their enemies. [In this connection it is pertinent to remark that, while there has undoubtedly been much ill-treatment of Koreans by Japanese, I have never known of any of that bitter race-hatred toward the former by the latter, which undoubtedly at the present time permeates a large part of the Korean population toward the Japanese.] On being asked to say a few words to these students, I spoke of the unreasonable and un-Christian character of race-hatred and asked them to put from their minds all such foolish and wicked feelings. And then, as though to emphasize the beauty and brightness of nature as contrasted with the unseemly and dark condition of man, we came out under a sky as clear and alight with scintillating stars as I have ever seen in India or in Egypt.

On our arrival at the station of Pyeng-yang, to return to Seoul, on the morning of Wednesday, April 10th, the little fellows from the Presbyterian mission-school were there before us, already in line with Korean and American flags flying, and with drums and trumpets making a creditable noise. The appropriate parting address to this school had scarcely been finished, when another school appeared in the distance, on the double-quick for the station, to whom, when they had got themselves into proper shape, Dr. Noble repeated the substance of the words just spoken to their comrades earlier arrived. Scarcely was this finished, when, for the third time—and now it was the pupils from the Confucian school—a troop of boys came scurrying through the dust, lined up, and claimed their share of the foreign sahib’s parting salutation and advice. And then we were slowly drawn out of the station, and leaving behind on the fence the several hundred school-children and on the platform the several score of Korean Christians and of Japanese who had come to send us off, we returned without further incident to Seoul.

The few crowded days at Pyeng-yang appear in retrospect as an epitome of Korean history, Korean temperament, and the physical and social relations sustained in the past and at the present time between Korea and Japan. Improvement may confidently be expected in the near future, according as the economical and social forces are combined with the moral and the religious to bear upon the population now adult. But the larger and more permanent hopes for the future depend upon the school-children, who, even to-day, are becoming more intelligent, orderly, and self-controlled than their ancestors ever have been.