In Korea with Marquis Ito

by George Trumbull Ladd

CHAPTER IX
THE PROBLEM: HISTORICAL

An authentic and trustworthy history of Korea has never been written; and enormous difficulties await the investigator who, in the future, attempts this task. The native records, almost down to the present time, consist of the same uncritical mixture of legend, fable, oral tradition, and unverified written narrative which characterizes the earliest so-called histories of all civilized peoples. But the Korean civilization has not as yet produced any writer both ambitious and able to treat this material in a way corresponding to the opportunity it affords. All the narratives of events, except those of the most recent date, which have been written by foreigners, have, of necessity, been lacking in that intimate acquaintance with the Korean language, institutions, customs, and the temperament and spirit of the people, which is the indispensable equipment of the historian. The antiquities and other physical records of an historical character have, moreover, never to any considerable extent been explored. A striking example of this general truth was afforded only a short time ago when Dr. George Heber Jones discovered the fact that a wrong date (by a whole century) had been given for the casting of the Great Bell at Chong-no—one of the most conspicuous public objects of interest in Seoul; yet the correct date was inscribed on the bell itself! The reason for this petty falsifying of historical fact was characteristically Korean; it was in order that the honor of casting the bell might be ascribed to the Founder of the present Dynasty.

In spite of these facts, however, the main outlines of the development of Korea are unmistakable. Its history has been, for the ruling classes, one long, monotonous, almost unbroken record of misrule and misfortune; and for the people an experience of poverty, oppression, and the shedding of blood. That they have endured at all as the semblance of a nation, although not “as an organized state in the modern sense,” has been due chiefly to these two causes: first, to a certain native quality of passive resistance, varied by periods of frenzied uprising against both native and foreign oppressors; and, second, to the fact that the difficulties encountered in getting over mountains and sea, in order to maintain a foreign rule long enough to accomplish these ends, have prevented their stronger neighbors on all sides from thoroughly subjugating and absorbing them. This latter reason may be stated in another way: it has hitherto never been worth the cost to terminate the independent existence of the Korean nation.

Nor is it difficult to learn from authentic sources the two most potent reasons for the unfortunate and evil state throughout their history of the Korean people. These reasons are, on the one hand, the physical results of repeated invasions from the outside; and, on the other hand, the adoption and perpetuation, in a yet more mischievous and degraded fashion, of the civil and official corruptions received from Korea’s ancient suzerain, China. It is customary to attach great importance, both as respects the damage done to the material interests of the country, and also as accounting for the Korean hatred of the Japanese, to the invasion of Hideyoshi. But the undoubted facts do not bear out this contention. The lasting effects of this incoming of foreign armed forces from the south, and of their short-lived and partial occupation of Korean territory, were relatively unimportant. None of the institutions of Korea were changed; none of her physical resources were largely depleted. It was just those places in which the Japanese remained in the most intimate relations with the Koreans, where there was least permanent development of race hatred. But the results of the successive invasions from the north and northwest, by the wild tribes, by the Mongols, and by the Chinese and Manchu dynasties, were much more injurious in every way to the physical well-being of the peninsula.

It is one of the most remarkable contrasts between Japan and Korea that, whereas the more distinctly moral elements of Confucianism moulded a noble and knightly type of character in the former country, in its neighbor the doctrines of the great Oriental teacher chiefly resulted in forming the average official into a more self-conceited but really corrupt and mischievous personality. Indeed, the baleful influence of China, especially since the establishment of the Manchu dynasty, has been the principal hindrance to the industrial and civic development of Korea. The contribution made to its civilization by Chinese letters, inventions, and arts, has been no adequate compensation for the depressing and debasing character of the imported political and social system. The official institutions and practices of the suzerain have for centuries been bad enough at home; but here they have been even worse, whether admiringly copied or enforced by the influence of its Court and the power of its army. And, whereas the great multitude of the Chinese people have displayed for a long time the inherent power of industrial self-development and of successful business intercourse with foreigners, the Koreans have thus far been relatively lacking in the qualities essential for every kind of material and governmental success. Thus all the civilization of Korea has been so characterized by weakness and corruption as to excite contempt as well as disapprobation from the moralist’s and the economist’s points of view. It is China and not Japan which through some 2,000 years of past history has been the expensive and bloody enemy, and the political seducer and corrupter of Korea.

The division of the history of Korea, made by Mr. Homer B. Hulbert, into ancient and modern—the latter period beginning in 1392, with the founding of the present dynasty—is entirely without warrant. “Modern history” can scarcely be said to have begun in the so-called “Hermit Kingdom” previous to the time when a treaty was concluded between Japan and Korea by General Kuroda, acting as Plenipotentiary, on February 26, 1876. Even then, the first Korean Embassy under the new régime, having arrived at Yokohama by a Japanese steamer on the following May 29th, when it started back to Korea a month later, refused all overtures of Western foreigners to communicate with their country. From the time when the present kingdom arose by the union of the three previously existing kingdoms, the doings of the Korean Court and of the Korean people have been substantially the same. When threatened by foreign invaders or by popular uprisings and official rebellion at home, the Court—a motley crowd or mob, of King, palace officials, eunuchs, concubines, blind men, sorceresses, and other similar retainers of the palace—has, as a rule, precipitately fled to some place of refuge, deserted by efficient military escort and in most miserable plight. Only when behind walls and compelled to fight, or when aroused to a blind fury in the form of a mob, does the average Korean show the courage necessary to defend or to avenge his monarch. The saying of the Japanese that “the Koreans are kittens in the field and tigers in the fortress” characterized their behavior during the Hideyoshi invasion; it is characteristic of them to-day. Three centuries ago, when the king was in flight from Seoul to Pyeng-yang his own attendants stole his food and left him hungry; and the Korean populace, left behind in Seoul rose at once and burned and looted what the Court had not carried away. “Before many days had elapsed the people found out that the coming of the Japanese did not mean universal slaughter, as they had supposed, and gradually they returned to their lands in the city. They reopened their shops, and as long as they attended to their own affairs they were unmolested by the Japanese. Indeed, they adapted themselves readily to the new order of things, and drove a lucrative trade with the invaders”![5] In these respects, too, the voice of Korean history is a witness with a monotone; as it was in 1592 and earlier, so it has been down to the present time.

In one other most important respect there has been little variation in the records of Korean history. Brave, loyal, and good men, when they have arisen to serve their monarch and their country, have never been permitted to flourish on Korean soil. The braver, more loyal and unselfish they have been, the more difficult has the path to the success of their endeavors been made by a corrupt Court and an ignorant and ungrateful populace. Almost without exception such men—rare enough at the best in Korean history—have been traduced by their enemies and deserted and degraded by their king. Curing the Hideyoshi invasion the most worthy leader of the Korean forces by land was General Kim Tuk-nyung. It is said that the Christian Japanese General Konishi had so high an opinion of General Kim that he had a portrait of him made, and on seeing it exclaimed: “This man is indeed a general.” But, on account of Kim’s success, his enemies maligned him; the king had him arrested, brought to Seoul, and, after a disgraceful trial, executed. In all Korea’s history there has never been another man to whom the nation has owed so much for his courage, devotion, and genius in affairs of war as to Admiral Yi. It was he, more than all others—king, officers, and common soldiers—who accomplished the final ill-success of the Japanese invasion. It was Admiral Yi who destroyed all chance of re-enforcing the Japanese army in Seoul, and who thus actually did what the Russian fleet in the recent war could not begin to do. But this great patriot and successful leader, under the same baleful influences, was degraded to the rank of a common soldier and barely escaped with his life. Quite uniformly such has been the fate of the true patriots and best leaders during all Korea’s history, and this just because they were true and of the best. Such would to-day be the fate of the saving elements left in Korean official circles if the hand of Japan were withdrawn. Indeed, as we have already seen, the most difficult part of the Resident-General’s problem is to cultivate and to protect Korean leaders of a trustworthy character. It is Korea’s national characteristic to “stone her prophets”; but few of them have had “whited sepulchres” built to them by future generations.

The more ancient relations of Japan and Korea were such as are common to people who inhabit contiguous lands at the corresponding stage of civilization. “As to the relations between the two nations,” says Brinkley,[6] “they were limited for a long time to mutual raids.” On the one side, the Japanese could complain that, in the first century B.C., when a pestilence had reduced their forces, Korean freebooters invaded Kiushiu and settled themselves in the desolated hamlets of the Japanese; that the Koreans lent assistance to the semi-savage aborigines of the same island and to the Mongol invaders; and that their citizens who wished to enter into friendly relations of commerce with the neighboring peninsula were treated with scorn and even with violence. On the other side, there was valid ground for the charge that Japanese pirates, either alone or in conjunction with Chinese, often invaded the coasts of Korea; and that Japanese traders by no means always conducted themselves in a manner to win the confidence and friendship of the inhabitants of the peninsula.

Peony Point at Pyeng-Yang.