Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

The constitution of the Korean Home Office is based upon the Japanese system. The Foreign Office is modelled on the Chinese Foreign Office. At the head of the War Office is the Pan Sö, or decisive signature, an official of very great power. Under him are several lesser officials called Cham Pan, or help to decide. Under these are men called Cham Wi, or help to discuss, and again under these are a number of secretaries. But alas! in the present Oriental imbroglio (although Korea is nominally the causa belli), the Korean War Department is playing a part so insignificant, that we do not even hear of it.

The Korean army, as estimated by the Korean War Office, represents a goodly number of men, and European writers of note have put down the militant force of the country at a million and more. But even, numerically speaking, this statement should be taken with a whole cellar of salt, and martially speaking, exaggeration could not decently go farther. The Korean army is but the shadow of an army, the harmless phantom of a force that once drove the invading Japanese armies from the shores of Chosön, and made the warriors of an American iron-clad pay dearly for their intrusion.

But if the prowess of the Korean soldiery is gone, its picturesqueness remains, and in its very inefficiency it speaks to us of the days—now probably gone for ever—when weapons at which we smile to-day were formidable indeed, the days when warfare which would excite the scorn of our school-boys was warfare grim and earnest. And as we watch that martial mockery—the army of Korea—we may realize that the yesterday of Chosön was midway between the copiously equipped to-day of our modern, European civilization, and that primeval time when there were no implements, the days when women used thorns for needles, and men used thorns for fish-hooks.

Korea deals with crime as rigorously as China does, but her methods of punishment—especially the most cruel ones—have been borrowed from Japan, or borrowed by Japan from Korea. In China, Japan, and Korea we constantly find the same ideas, the same methods of life, with only the slightest local differentiations, but more often than not it is impossible for the most erudite scholar—not to mention the casual European wayfarer—to determine in which of the three countries the common idea or custom was born.

Some of the customary Korean punishments would make, I think, too painful reading: this, I am sure, they would make too painful writing. I must refer the reader who is curious to Hamel; for Hamel details them with considerable gusto, even the most horrible: the punishment that used to be meted out to Korean murderers. Happily, even in Korea, time cures some ills, and of later years, particularly under the rule of the present king, a good, wise, and gentle man, the Korean criminal code, if it has not assimilated some fraction of that quality which “is an attribute to God Himself,” has at least ceased to be the thing of horrid cruelty it was; and if the laws of Chosön are more pitiless than the laws of Draco, still they disgrace the humanity of Korea far less than they did two thousand years ago. I know of no other respect in which Korea has changed more.

Here are two examples of Korean law—two laws that for centuries were so rigidly carried out that their enforcement became national customs.

“If a woman murder her husband she is to be taken to a highway on which many people pass, and she shall be buried up to her shoulders. Beside her an axe shall be laid, and with that axe all who pass by her, unless they be noble, must strike her on the head, and this none, save the noble, must fail to do, until she be dead.”

There are no bankruptcy courts in Korea. A Korean who once contracts a debt can never escape from it. Here is the law:⁠—

“One who owes money, and at the promised time fails to pay it, whether the debt be to his Majesty the King, or to another person or other persons, shall be beaten two or three times a month on the shin, and this punishment shall be continued until the debt is discharged. If a man die in debt, his relations must pay that debt, or be beaten two or three times a month on the shin.”

This old law, slightly modified, still holds in Korea, I believe. Of course it works both ways. It makes it very hard for the debtor to escape payment; it makes it almost impossible for the creditor to lose any part of his substance.