In Korea with Marquis Ito

by George Trumbull Ladd

Among the most serious of the charges which are important and, in certain instances, true, is that made against the military authorities for the appropriation of lands for military and railway uses, to an unreasonable extent, and in unfair ways. “There can be no question,” says Mr. D. W. Stevens, “that at the outset the military authorities in Korea did intimate an intention of taking more land for these uses than seemed reasonable. They proceeded upon the principle that the Korean Government had bound itself to grant all land necessary for railway and military uses, and itself to indemnify the owners—an assumption which was technically correct. But the owners, knowing the custom of their own government under such circumstances, were hopeless of obtaining anything like adequate redress. This, it should be remembered, happened during the war, when martial law was in the ascendant.” When peace came, other counsels prevailed; the intention to appropriate additional large tracts was abandoned; and the amount staked off for military purposes was greatly reduced—was, indeed, in several instances, made only a fraction of the original amount. For all the domain granted or appropriated by the Korean Government there has already accrued to the country, in transportation facilities and other economic and political advantages, far more than its actual value at the time of its granting or appropriation. For the private land owned by Koreans a fair price was paid in the majority of cases. The prohibition of the owners within the delimited areas to sell their lands and houses was designed to prevent prior purchase by speculators and other indirect attempts to obtain extravagant prices. The military authorities, under the pressure of what they regarded as necessity, solved these difficulties in the military way—a way that certainly does not commend itself to civilians in times of peace, but which has been employed too often by all the other civilized nations to enable them to cast stones freely at the Japanese. Even by these high-handed measures they could not avoid, in certain cases, paying much more for land owned by foreigners than it was really worth.[83]

It must further be confessed that a considerable number of Japanese sharpers—for the most part usurious money-lenders—have obtained land from Koreans in unjust and oppressive ways. This species of robbery is made the more difficult to detect and punish for the following reasons: The Korean customs and laws concerning the transference of titles to land are inadequate and confusing (for this reason, some of the landed property belonging to other foreigners than the Japanese, and even to the missionary bodies, would have no little difficulty in establishing title); the Koreans are given to issuing false and forged deeds, or in their ignorance claiming title and conferring title where no such right exists; finally, in numerous instances, both Korean or foreign “squatters” (see [p. 295 f.]) and the government or some of its officials are asserting, either honestly or fraudulently, their holding of good title to the same piece of land. On all this class of offences we may trust implicitly the statement of the foreign official (an American) whose duty has led him to examine into a large number of these cases: “The theft of land by eviction, false deeds, etc.,” says this authority, “is another offence upon which great stress has been laid. Undoubtedly there were a number of cases of this kind, although here again exaggeration has been at work. The commonest instances were those where money-lenders were concerned; and, in these cases, as in almost all others of the kind, Koreans were associated in some way or other with the frauds which were perpetrated. A spendthrift son or nephew would give false title-deeds, or even pawn the genuine ones without authority; a Korean rascal would conspire with a Japanese of the same kidney to defraud other Koreans, and so on through the long gamut of fraud wherein Korean connivance was an indispensable prerequisite to success. The offences relating to land have now been rendered practically impossible through the promulgation of land regulations by the Residency-General.”

In a word, offences of this kind committed by the Japanese against the Koreans, however numerous and grievous they may have been, have proved short-lived; they were formerly due to the disturbed conditions of a period of war, and will now speedily be brought to an end. Summing them all up, and even without making allowance for exaggerations, the cry of the Koreans against the Japanese on the charge of fraud and oppression touching their land is only as a drop to a good-sized bucket compared with the cry of the Irish against the English, or of the Koreans themselves against their own countrymen. The wrongs are small indeed as compared with those which have characterized the behavior of Americans against Americans in our own West.[84]

Of brutal and murderous assaults from Japanese upon Korean men and women there are indeed instances; but the cases prove on examination to have been by no means frequent. They have been, on the whole, fewer than such crimes are accustomed to be between peoples of two nations similarly placed. Indeed, they have been fewer than those occurring to-day between different classes and different nationals in many of the civilized countries of the Western World. They bear no comparison to the horrors which have for centuries been familiar in most of the Orient, including Korea itself. “Wholesale military executions,” for example, of the Koreans who tore up the track of the military railroad have been charged against the Japanese as virtually murders. But during the entire war there was never a single instance of what is known as “drum-head court martial” of a Korean for such an offence. After the trial the evidence in each case was transmitted to the Headquarters at Seoul, where the case was confirmed, modified, or reversed. The Japanese military authorities consented to have a Korean official present at each trial as an amicus curiæ of the defendant; but the Korean Government declined to be represented and claimed that all such cases should be tried before their own officials only. What would have been the outcome of such a committal of the most vital military interests of Japan to Korean magistrates it needs no great amount of experience to judge. A Korean, for example, who had been arrested by a Japanese gendarme and taken before a native magistrate was duly punished for “throwing a stone at the railway!” But on his being rearrested and tried before a military court it was established that the man had been repeatedly convicted of piling stones upon the track with a view to wreck the trains conveying the Japanese soldiers; whereupon the sentence of the military court was confirmed from Headquarters and the man was quite properly executed.

Of the killing of Koreans, unprovoked and without the excuse of self-defence, by Japanese, there have been at no time any considerable number of cases. Indeed, the murders of men and women of the other nationality, while in the quiet discharge of their official duty or in their homes, have been far more numerous. This was especially true while the country was stirred to riot and bloodshed by the abdication of the Emperor in July, 1907, and by the disbandment of the Korean army, when mistaken or feigned “patriotism” was showing itself in the customary Korean way. But that there is nothing new about all this, a reference to chapters which have sketched (IX and X) the history of the relations of the countries in the past centuries will abundantly show.

Of serious and unprovoked assaults of Koreans by Japanese there have been, doubtless, a considerable number. It would be impossible to tell just how many, even as a result of the most patient and candid investigation;—if for no other reason, because the Korean habit of exaggeration and lying renders almost all the uncorroborated testimony of the natives untrustworthy. This experience with official lying to cover their own countrymen against the demands of foreigners for justice, or to enforce indemnity in cases of false charges made against foreigners for assault on Koreans, is not confined to the Japanese. It is the common experience with all Korean judicial procedure.[85]

Among the more serious unproved charges against Japanese officials was that of torturing Korean prisoners by Japanese gendarmes at the time of the so-called “cleansing” of the Palace. Mr. Hulbert published this charge and specified, on the authority of “numerous witnesses,” the exact character of the torture—namely, by a kind of iron instrument designed to squeeze the head. Immediately Marquis Ito took up the matter and sent a messenger to Mr. Hulbert to express his earnest desire to probe the matter thoroughly; and his intention, in case the charge was proved, to punish the offenders severely. This request implied, as a matter of course, the pledge of protection to the witnesses; and Mr. Hulbert agreed to furnish the evidence. But when this could not be done, the excuse was first offered that the witnesses were afraid to come forward; and next, the “numerous witnesses” resolved themselves into one person, who had “gone into the country.” When still further pressed to furnish the promised evidence, the story of the iron head-rack was altogether abandoned, and for it was substituted the charge that a certain eunuch had been arrested and beaten by the police. But this, if it occurred, is only according to the Korean custom of judicial procedure, still to be allowed, after the torture of criminals had been legally abolished under Japanese influence. Nevertheless, this confessedly false charge was afterward included in a pamphlet by the same authority as another instance of Japanese outrages in Korea.[86]