Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

The plague that so recently devastated China, though more repulsive in detail, is far less hopeless to contemplate than the Japanese earthquakes. If China should ever come to the adopting of fairly proper sanitary laws, if China’s poverty should ever go down once and for all beneath the iron heel of China’s really vast common sense, and China’s infinite capacity of contrivance, then would China, always vigorous, be baptized into new health, and then would China’s plagues be matters of the past.

I am fain to hope all good things for China. But I fear that earthquakes will never be matters of the past in Japan. Well, both these peoples—one very great, the other very charming—have been sorely afflicted within the last year, and both have fell a-fighting.

We can only hope that right may prove mighty, and that in the near end peace may crown the Asiatic all.

We always think of Japanese women as the embodiment of everything that is feminine and gentle. And with the exception of the yoshiwara and the hardest worked women of the coolie class, we picture the women of Japan as shrinking from publicity, from unnecessary exertion, and from anything bordering on self-assertion. Yet in the days gone by Japan has had a class of women who have been quite opposite to all this, and yet who have been neither yoshiwara nor coolies. I mean the Japanese Amazons, who have more than once played active parts in Japanese warfares. This class has quite died out, but during the present Chino-Japanese war a number of Japanese women of high birth have petitioned the Mikado to permit them to join the army—join it as active soldiers—at least, so a recent despatch says. This is funny; but not in the least incredible. The Japanese are the funniest people alive. They are perpetually doing the most unexpected, I might almost say the most indefensible things, but they do them with such an air of artistic propriety, that it is a very keen-eyed European indeed who realizes that anything not altogether au fait, mentally or morally, has happened.

The Japanese are so incapable of a gaucherie that we do not appreciate their very extensive capacity for folly.

A Japanese woman in the thick of the fight! Her kimono well tucked up from her little dimpled feet. Her obi bulging with cartridges! A knapsack rubbing corns on the sweet, stooped, brown shoulders! Armed cap-à-pie! A plumed helmet crushing down the elaborate shape of her perfumed coiffure! A sword hitting roughly against the warm limb, to which bright-eyed, brown children have been wont to gently cling! A great coarse gun chafing the soft arm and softer breast where laughing, yellow babies have slept and dreamed glad, soft dreams, and as they learned to love their mother’s milk, learned the three great lessons of Japanese life: learned to be happy, learned to be courteous, learned to be beautiful and artistic! It makes me laugh.

And yet I do not discredit the veracity of the telegram. The Japanese women are very, very drowsy. But when they wake up—and semi-occasionally they do wake up—they wake up with a start.

Great occasions seem to infuse them with electricity. I quite believe that to-day there are in Japan thousands of delicate, daintily accustomed, women who would gladly join the active ranks of war. Japanese patriotism is as supreme, as gracious, as graceful as Japanese art; and unlike Japanese art it is often visionary.

That the Japanese women want to fight the Chinese soldiers—is very amusing, and rather interesting. It proves that they have pluck. It proves that they have bad taste. That it does prove them guilty of bad taste makes it remarkable. The Chino-Japanese wrangle over Korea is, I believe, the first event in all our world’s long history that has convicted the women of Japan of bad taste.

Whether any Japanese women would prove effective soldiers, I doubt. I doubt if even the women of the coolie class: the women who sort tea in Kobe, the women who, in Nagasaki, running up and down the sides of P. and O. and other steamers, carry upon their muscular brown backs, murderous loads of coal, would advantageously augment the Japanese army. I doubt if the women of the Ainos (the Ainos are the fiercest, wildest people of Japan) would acquit themselves usefully in the field of battle. That the women of Japan would acquit themselves bravely, nobly, in the terrible moment of battle, admits of no doubt. But to be brave is one thing; to be noble is another; to be useful is still another.