Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

There is, however, an underlying fact, which seems to me to account above everything else—yes, and to account philosophically—for the humbling of China, and the swift advance of Japan. The Chinese are creative as a race; the Japanese are imitative. A creative nature is self-reliant; and an imitative nature is, of necessity, self-doubtful. China has been inclined to rely upon herself; Japan has doubted herself and relied upon Europe. China’s strength has been China’s weakness; the weakness of Japan has proven Japan’s strength. It is true that China has bought ships and guns from Europe; that she has borrowed officers to drill her soldiers, and to manage her ships; but all this has been done in a spirit of disallowance. She has always believed in herself. To her, all the rest of the world is, as it was to ancient Rome, “barbarian.”

Japan lacking, as a nation, the creative faculty, possesses, more eminently than any other nation, the imitative faculty. Her art is borrowed from China and Korea; her methods of government, and her methods of war from that Western world to which she has so lately, for the first time, opened her gates. Japan is victorious to-day because of her self-distrust, and because of her eager and compliant imitation of Western methods. China is defeated to-day because of her half-hearted adoption of European ways and means.

Japan jumps at conclusions with the swift intelligence of a bright woman. China proves, and proves again, the worth of any custom or method that she adopts. Japan improves everything that she adopts. China is more like a wise man, she understands everything that she adopts. China is the slower, but China is the surer.

Japan has so far had the best of the fight, because she has imitated us, and because she has been able to mobilize her forces.

Whether the present war will suddenly break through the thick crust of Chinese self-sufficiency, of Chinese bigotry, of Chinese hatred of change, remains to be seen. If it does, China may swiftly regain her lost ground. In any event it is not probable that so thoughtful, so wise, so reasonable a people as the Chinese will fail to sooner or later learn thoroughly the lesson which this present war preaches to them. Perhaps in a few months, perhaps in twenty or thirty years, but surely sometime, China will learn how right Galileo was, how decidedly the world does move, and how needful it is that we who live on the world, should move with the world. Then we may all learn how great a people the Chinese really are; how vastly superior in many ways to their more fascinating, more artistic, but less stable neighbours—the Japanese.

I am not, I know, taking a popular view of the relative admirableness of China and Japan; but I believe that I take the true view. It is a view diametrically opposed to the consensus of European opinion, but it is not a view altogether original with me. A number of eminent men, who have spent some of the best years of their lives in China and Japan, compare the two peoples quite as much to the advantage of China as I have ventured to do. In 1882 Herr von Brandt, who was then the German minister to Pekin, who had previously been in office in Tokio, an able diplomat, and a man greatly valued by Sir Harry Parkes, wrote to Sir Harry:—“The news you gave me about the treaty revision has interested me much. For my part I would see no objection to the institution of a kind of mixed court for all cases in which Japanese were concerned, provided the judges were elected from a certain number of persons nominated by the Treaty Powers. The proposal to submit foreigners to the Japanese police jurisdiction seems inadmissible; conflicts of all kinds and gravity would, in my opinion, be the immediate consequences of such a concession. In general it seems to me that the Japanese have done nothing which could entitle them to the concessions they demand, and that the experience of the past hardly authorizes any far-going experiment for the future; the fact that Japanese jurisdiction is at the present moment as bad as can be can hardly be given as a reason to extend it over those who are not subjected to it for the present. The opening of the country to foreign trade can hardly be considered as a fair equivalent, as the Japanese, if the measure is carried out, are certain to reap much more benefit from it than the foreigners will ever do. After all, I am glad that it is not my business to put the Japanese world right again: with all their faults there is much more steadiness and logic in the Chinese than in their high flightinesses the sons of the land of the Rising Sun.”

Yes; the Japanese have a graceful knack of quietly getting the best of most bargains, and certainly the opening of the Japanese treaty ports to Europeans has, as regards everything but art, benefited Japan far more than it has benefited Europe. Herr von Brandt’s prophecy has been more than fulfilled, and that gives some little weight to his opinion that there is more steadiness and logic in the Chinese than in the Japanese.

Sir Harry Parkes had as much cause as man well could have to hate the Chinese; and yet, again and again, he has felt impelled to utter some testimony in their favour. On the fourteenth of December, 1874, he wrote to Sir D. Brooke Robertson:—“I think our views resemble very closely on the China-Japan question, now of the past fortunately. The luck has fallen to Japan, who certainly did not deserve it. I can’t help feeling sorry to see the old country opposite give in, when she had right on her side, to this youngster among nations.”

How history repeats itself! Twenty years ago the war cloud that hung over China and Japan was fanned away by the temperate winds of European advice, absorbed in the sunshine of common sense. To-day the storm of war has burst over Further Asia, burst in splendid, awful fury; and the Chinese and Japanese are slaying each other by the shoal. We have taught them how to do it. And the Chinese Goliath lies smitten (smitten almost to death, at least so his enemy seems to think), by the well directed pebbles of Japan. Of the effect of the successive and reportedly crushing blows administered by Japan to her colossal neighbour, it is, of course, too early to speak with confidence. Success means so much to China, that should the present run of ill luck continue, the downfall of the reigning dynasty would not be surprising. A victorious Japanese army in the streets of Pekin would almost inevitably so result. Let us hope that China—China the picturesque, China the beautiful—will not be bowed so low as that. Our own interests in the Orient would suffer materially through such a radical disturbance of the balance of power. For our own sake, and for the sake of right, it is to be hoped that China will be spared the humiliation of opening the gates of her sacred and capital city to an invading army from Japan. That would be the saddest misfortune that has ever befallen China: sadder far than the misfortune that befell her when we took from her the island of Hong Kong, and flew our flag above the dragon on the imperial palace at Pekin. But so long as Japan is essentially stronger in army and in navy than China, China must submit, with what grace she can, to defeat. But having learned from us how to fight, it really is too bad of Japan to turn up at us her pretty, little, yellow nose, to shake her flower-crowned head at us in derision, or to make it uncomfortable for our countrymen and women within her gates.

This is as true of the Japanese to-day as when Sir Harry Parkes wrote it twenty years ago:—“The Japanese have committed the error of believing all that they have been told about themselves and increasing this by their own imagination, and the result is that their own little island is too small to hold them.”