Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

Nature does ten hundred gracious, gentle, mother-kindnesses to Japan, and Japan accepts them all, and asks for more, and then Nature, well, Nature’s nerves give out, and as many another mother, who has an almost idolatrous love for her child, has done, Nature gives Japan a fearful shaking. When Nature recovers herself a bit, and sees what she has done, she is always very sorry, and about the tumbled, broken, paper houses, through the ruined fields of paddy and of rice, over the heaps of torn and burned wisteria, well, she does what mothers have done before her, she stoops and kisses the place that she has made sting, she scatters violets over her pet child’s bruises, she makes vines, blue with blossom and purple with perfume, grow over the marks which she has made upon the dimpled limbs and the pretty features of her favourite, but somewhat trying child.

But a kiss never yet altogether made up for a blow. Our children forgive us our cruelties, but they never forget them; and Japan is always in a state of apprehension. Japan is always afraid that in another moment its mother Nature may lose her temper, and Nature does not often keep Japan long waiting.

For centuries the great artifice of the Japanese Government (or should I say the great art?) has been to divert the minds of the perpetually frightened Japanese people. The criminal going to the gallows often conserves his personal dignity, and augments his personal courage with a glass of brandy. The Japanese Government holds to the lips of its once-so-often-to-be-by-earthquake-shaken-and-perhaps-destroyed people a cup of redder wine—Blood. The blood of adversaries, or the blood of themselves, seems to be the liquor that, from the earliest history of Japan, has had the greatest power to intoxicate the Japanese people, and to make them forget the sword that hangs above them, and which in any moment may fall and cut into the bowels of their country.

Korea has, of course, been for a very long time an excuse for war between China and Japan. They seem to have an uncontrollable appetite for wrangling with each other, and poor Korea hangs, like a ready bone, between the open, snarling mouths of Ah-man and Yamamato.

But, for all that, I verily believe that the immediate causes of the present war in Asia were the plague in China, and the earthquakes in Japan. The minds of the Chinese, and the minds of the Japanese, had to be diverted, else might they both have gone mad. This is true, at least of Japan, who struck the first blow, and in many ways forced the war. Korea has been offered up in sacrifice by China and Japan, with a devotion to their own safeties, and a belief in their own gods, which would have done credit to Abraham. They poured the vitriol of their hatred over Korea, and lit her myriad gardens with the torch of war, as complacently as Moses slew the task-master in the brick-field of Pharaoh.

Earthquakes are perhaps as little understood as any of Nature’s mysterious phenomena. A new science has sprung up almost mushroom-like amongst us of recent years; a science that is attempting the elucidation to human understanding of the laws that govern earthquakes. This new science has not as yet made much positive headway, and seismologists themselves know comparative little of the phenomena they study.

To-day we are in a Japanese village. In every door-yard great clumps of gorgeous chrysanthemums echo the glory of the sunset, wonderful tangles of wisteria throw their plum-coloured shadows upon the clean white paper windows, and the clean white paper doors of the hundred or more clean little houses. Upon the spotless-floored, flower-wreathed verandahs the waning sunshine sketches in crimson, in purple, and in gold the outlines of the wisteria petals, and the wisteria leaves. Roses, crimson and white and yellow, spot the grass. Painted bowls of blue and white porcelain, heaped with silky rice, stand on the verandahs, and on one verandah, perhaps, stands an old bowl of yellow Satsuma, which holds the evening meal of rice. Lacquered trays of fish stand beside the bowls of rice. The families, soft-featured, pleasing of face, graceful of gesture, gentle of manner, squat artistically upon the spotless floors. The sun sets, the moon comes up, the rice and the fish have been eaten. The birds and the butterflies sing. All is peace and contentment. The beautiful bowls have been tenderly washed, and the villagers have gone to sleep, resting their elaborately dressed heads upon their queer little wooden pillows.

To-morrow we are in the same village, but where is the village? It is torn and crushed. A thrill has passed through the earth at sunrise The chrysanthemums shake their heavy heads in terror, the wisteria vines are alive with dismay, every purple head quivering with afright. Every golden bell upon every crimson, lacquered, carved temple cries out in alarm so musical, so sweet, that it is incomprehensible that even so angry, so momentarily relentless a mother as Nature is not moved to pity, and to stay her hand. But no. The wisterias are roughly wrenched from off the walls up which they were wont to climb, decking foot after foot with their lavish beauty. The chrysanthemums are torn into rags so small and pitiful, that if here and there we find an unmutilated petal it seems to us quite huge.

There are few sights more pitiful than the sight of a Japanese village that has been broken by earthquake. Bits of wood, shreds of paper, wrecks of trees, broken flowers, torn vines are tangled together in picturesque, but deplorable débris. The people are homeless, at the best, more than probably, they, too, are torn and maimed, most possibly they are killed. The rice is spilled, and the bowls of blue, and white, and of yellow Satsuma are broken. Silver pipes, torn kimonos, bits of pottery, that if whole again were worth a king’s ransom, strew the scene, and for the moment hide the gashes in the ground. And yet, like everything else in Japan, even this scene of desolation has its juvenile aspect; it looks not unlike a toy that a spoiled child has broken in anger.

The trouble, the misery, the agony, physical and mental, that earthquakes entail year in and year out on the people of Japan is beyond exaggeration, and quite beyond the pale of light writing. All thinking travellers must feel that it is no wonder that a people periodically subjected to such momentous torture, periodically need a big stimulant. And so, perhaps, it is less shame (than at the first glance it seems) to the powers that in Japan be, that soon after the recent disembowelment of Nagasaki, and the upheaval of many other Japanese states and villages, they, the powerful ones of Japan, have seen fit to go to war with China.