Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

In the Orient professional unchastity is not considered altogether immoral. “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This may not be altogether true, but certainly there is a good deal of truth in it. The unfortunate women of the East have vastly more self-respect than have the unfortunate women of the West. They are not despised, and therefore they do not despise themselves; nor are they driven by the merciless scourges of public opinion to lower and coarser methods of life than those unavoidably entailed by the profession they follow. Their profession is not considered an honourable, an elevating, nor an enviable one; but it is considered, by the people among whom they live, as a useful and necessary and, within certain loose limits, an honest one. This makes it possible for them to lead lives of comparative respectability, and to enjoy frankly, fearlessly, and purely some of the best things of life. The flowers that grow about their houses, and the wonderful skies that canopy their countries, convey to them no word of reproach. They gather the blossoms as innocently, and they smile back at the smiling heavens as unashamedly as does any maiden in the East.

If one gives a dog a sufficiently bad name it becomes almost righteous to hang him. The peoples of the Orient spare their unfortunate women unnecessary contumely. And this is the second reason why those women are better, less deplorable, individually and collectively, than are such women in Europe or America. This seems to me another instance of Asiatic justice and good sense. Why such women, and such women alone, should be blamed for an existing state of general immorality I cannot imagine. They are not responsible for it, though, of course, they help to perpetuate it. They take to life’s sad market-place wares for which they know there is a demand. They supply the demand; but they do not create it.

Immorality is not the only accomplishment necessary for the professional success of an Asiatic unfortunate. As I have said, companionship is the chief return an Eastern man expects and exacts for the coin that he throws into the lap of a light woman. The loose women of the East must be educated, and that they are educated makes it possible for them to spend many hours of each day in wholesome, refining occupations—occupations which are closed to the great mass of European unfortunates.

To recapitulate, the women of whom I am writing are of a better grade than are such women in the West, because in the East those women come from respectable homes and have memories of innocent and happy childhoods. Secondly, because they are so regarded in the East that they need not altogether part with self-respect; and lastly, because education and refinement are not only possible to them, but necessary to them, and because the majority of their professional hours are passed in conversation or with music, and are altogether free from coarseness.

I have spoken of these women as being out of the pale of matrimony. This is true, I believe, in China and in Korea, and in most other Oriental countries; but it is not at all true in Japan. It used to be in Japan an ordinary occurrence, and even now it is not, I think, unusual for a girl to sell herself for a stated period of time into the horrible slavery of a tea-house, or become for some definite number of years the mistress of a well-to-do man. This is often done to earn enough money to pay some debt of family honour, to redeem the pledged word of a father or of a brother. The girl who does it is considered anything and everything rather than a bad woman. She returns to her native village, or to her father’s house, when the time of her servitude has expired, and she is received with every possible sign of honourable welcome, and is pointed out then and thereafter as an example of daughterly perfection, and of virtuous womanhood. She marries as readily and as well as any of her girl friends, and her past is not regarded as to her detriment either by her husband or his family. This practice is more common among the poor than among the rich. But there are women of very high position in Japan who have had this terrible experience, and who have survived it, mentally and morally.

There is, of course, in Japan a large number of women who adopt immorality when they are very young, and who never put it aside. They are called yoshiwara women. In the old times they lived apart, not only in quarters of the town set aside for them, but in quarters that were enwalled, and through the gateways of which they could not pass without permission—permission that was not too readily granted. Even now there are streets set apart in almost every Oriental city—set apart for the occupancy of unfortunate women. The roads and the byways of Japan are sprinkled with tea-houses, and in almost every tea-house there are two or more yoshiwara women. These tea-houses are models of cleanliness, are usually pretty in situation, and always artistically furnished. The tea, cakes, and sweets sold in them are almost invariably delicious. The girls who are supposed to be the chief attraction of the tea-houses are rather brazen as a rule, far more so than the flower-girls of China, or the geisha girls of Korea, but it is a very butterfly sort of brazenness. Their manners are so pretty, their movements so bird-like, and their voices so tinkling and silvery, that it seems rather unfair to criticize them for being somewhat over-emphatic in what they say and do, and in how they say and do it.

I remember one warm afternoon in Kobe, I was in my jinrickshaw and several miles from home. I was tired, very thirsty, and my four-year-old boy, who was with me, assured me that he could not live much longer unless he had something to eat. I stopped at a tea-house—a pretty, carved, lantern-hung place that was perched on the hillside, not very far from the marvellous waterfall. I had not been very long in Japan, and had no idea that I was making a social blunder, but I noticed that my jinrickshaw coolie looked disturbed and dubious. Two Japanese girls sat on the verandah; one was smoking a long silver pipe, and the other was picking whispered music from a diminutive white guitar. One girl wore a kimono of pale green crêpe, brocaded with pink apple-blossoms; the other girl’s kimono was of dark, bright blue, but it was almost covered with huge yellow roses. Both girls wore the ordinary Japanese sash, had their hair elaborately dressed, and were rather loaded with jewellery. Through the openings of their kimonos peeped the edges of sundry other garments, all of crêpe or of silk, and all brilliantly coloured. They laughed and nodded as I came up the steps, and when I said that my boy and I were hungry and thirsty, one of them rose and led me into the house. We passed through a fair-sized room in which half a dozen European men, one of whom I happened to know, and as many Japanese girls were feasting rather merrily. The girls looked at me with considerable good-natured amusement; the European men looked at me in most considerable surprise. Baby and I were taken into a dainty little room which really was not big enough for more than two, and there were given quite a delightful luncheon. The girl who had showed us in waited upon us gravely and most attentively, and with admirable patience, for we were both hungry, very hungry, and thirsty, very thirsty. I found out afterwards that it was the first time she had poured afternoon tea for one of her own sex, and that I had made a most unfortunate mistake in going into the tea-house at all. But the girl who served us treated me and herself with perfect respect.

Respectable Japanese women wear the quietest of colours, in public at least. Bright flowers, glittering jewellery, and gaudy garments are the avowed livery of the yoshiwara women. They are pretty as a rule—these women—prettier even than the run of Japanese women; for in Japan personal beauty is considered one of the indispensable attributes of women who would lead a life of remunerative idleness.

The flower-girls of China are in most ways more to be pitied than the yoshiwara women of Japan. They are not as a rule so well educated, nor so comfortably housed, and though treated with a good deal of allowance, and collectively taken, as a matter of course, their position is neither so assured, nor the circumstances of their lives so endurable as are those of the Japanese girls. The breaking of the seventh commandment may be as common in China as it is in Korea or Japan, but it is not so lightly regarded, and the flower-girls are almost without exception the children of extreme poverty. And a Chinese woman who has once lived in a house of ill-fame can never go back to even apparent respectability. This is not so in the Straits Settlements, where there are very many Chinamen and very few Chinese women. In Singapore and in Penang Chinese girls who have been sent from China for immoral purposes very frequently marry well, and pass the rest of their lives in security and comfort. But in China I fancy that this never happens.

The Chinaman is the most domesticated of the men of the East, and the least fond of general society. He does not go to the houses of the flower-girls for society, for companionship, not at least in any quiet and unobjectionable sense, nor so commonly as do Korean and Japanese men. The Chinese flower-girl, except the very lowest type, is taught to sing, to play on several instruments, to heat wine and to spice it, to prepare delicacies and table dainties, and to serve a feast. She is taught to keep herself as good-looking from a Chinese standpoint as possible. But this is usually the list of her accomplishments, the limit of her education, and she is vastly ignorant compared to the women who dwell in the house of the man who patronizes her. Many of these Chinese women live outside the gates of Chinese cities. Thousands of them live in little boats that are called “flower-boats” and off of which they seldom go. The “flower-boats” of Canton are a most distinctive feature of that most distinctly quaint place. Shortly before the declaration of war between China and Japan, the following telegram was sent from Hong Kong:⁠—