Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

For all the admitted improvements they have brought, in spite of a distinct change of policy now under a civil instead of a military government, even the mere passer-by will scarcely fail to hear a long list of Korean grievances against the Japanese, and he is not unlikely to see some of these exemplified before his own eyes. The Japanese make so free with the country, run the complaints; they treat it as something picked up from the discard, with all signs of its former grandeur obliterated, no memory even of a former existence. They always speak of “Japan proper” when they mean their native islands, as if this great peninsula, more than half as large as their Empire “proper” including Formosa, and with seventeen million people who are distinctly not Japanese, were a mere tatter on the garment itself. They change without a by-your-leave not only the form of government but the very names of the provinces; they interfere in the minutest matters of every-day life—require people to walk on the left side of the street, for instance. Those who came when the country was first taken over did anything, the complaints continue, took anything, that pleased their fancy or appealed to their appetites, without payment, or at whatever they chose to pay. A new governor chased this riffraff out of the peninsula and a better class is now in evidence; but even these strike the passing observer as “cockier,” more arrogant than the average in Japan—and perhaps somewhat brighter.

One is quickly reminded of Poland under the Germans, from whom it might easily be suspected that the Japanese copied almost verbatim in their annexation of what was once Korea. Japanese get the cream of mines, factories, and other concessions; the advantages given the “Oriental Development Company,” in reality a semi-official, strictly Japanese, concern, amount to a scandal. The monopoly bank does about as it sees fit in rates and exchanges; wherever there is a chance for it a Japanese always seems to get the preference over a Korean. Railwaymen, policemen, even the “red caps” at stations, are nearly all Japanese; at such places the Japanese rickshaw-men are given the best stands, with their Korean competitors in the background. I was returning one night from Gensan on the east coast, whence there had just been put on a night train to Seoul, which for some reason had not been found worthy of carrying a sleeper. About twenty minutes before train-time I started through the platform gate, only to be stopped by the gateman, who almost at the same instant promptly punched the ticket of a little man in kimono and scraping wooden getas and let him pass. My training in taking a back seat having been neglected, I pushed past the gateman and followed the sandal-wearer across to the waiting train. From end to end it was half full of Japanese passengers, most of them stretched out on two double seats; and when, just before the train started, Korean passengers were admitted to the platform, there was little left for them to do but to squat on the floor or the arm of a seat here and there or stand up all night.

I have seen a petty Japanese official keep a public autobus waiting for half an hour while he played with his children or had a last cup of tea with his neighbors. Railway stations are, with few exceptions, miles from the towns they serve, though the line may run almost directly through them. Possibly, as those in authority claim, this is for protection, though I do not know from what; the disinterested visitor finds himself agreeing with the Koreans that it is probably done so that a Japanese town can grow up under more advantageous conditions than the old Korean city behind it, as has already happened in many cases, and perhaps to help the Japanese owners of Fords, rickshaws, and hotels. The Japanese hold up and examine mail, whether of Koreans, missionaries, or foreigners in general, at the slightest provocation, often, one suspects, out of mere curiosity. Korean youths who wish to go to school in America or Europe are almost invariably refused passports. Possibly a dozen are granted out of a thousand applications, and it often takes as long as a year to get those. One group of students who applied for permission to study industries abroad were told to study them in Chinnampo instead. To appreciate the joke fully one must have seen Chinnampo. In general the Koreans are virtually prisoners within their own country, and even if they escape from it they are not always safe. Koreans whose land has been taken away from them by force have moved to Manchuria and become Chinese citizens. Even if this prattle of “self-determination” means nothing so far as nations are concerned, certainly the right of an individual to choose his own allegiance should be axiomatic in this day and generation. But the Japanese will not recognize the Chinese citizenship of a Korean. Having taken the country, they claim possession of all its people also, irrespective of their location or personal choice, and send soldiers to round them up on the foreign soil of Manchuria, forcing the Chinese to hold them in their jails, bringing them back to Korea for trial, or shooting them on the spot.

Everywhere the Japanese stick together—another German trait; if they did not know the ropes and have everything in their favor, including the official language, say those who know both races well, the Koreans would outdo them in almost any line. Personally I could not sign so broad a statement, for though I have seen many indications that the Koreans are of quicker and sharper intelligence than the Japanese, they have other weaknesses which largely neutralize this advantage. But the policy in Korea, even in these improved days, seems never to be humanity and justice first, but Japan and the Japanese über alles—and after that whatever may conveniently be added. Koreans of standing say that Japan’s inability to overlook her petty interests for the fulfilment of greater things is her greatest weakness, as her policy of assimilation, of trying to make Koreans over into Japanese, which the experience of Germany in Poland should have taught her not to attempt, is her greatest mistake. The same dominating instinct which insists that even a railway porter shall be Japanese, if one applicant among a hundred is of that race, is manifest in all her political dealings, and this over-patriotism may prove her final undoing, where a bit less of it might permit her to continue as an unconquered nation under a single dynasty for another twenty-five hundred years.

Japan is eager to make Shintoists of the Koreans, to teach them that ancient cult of the mikado as a direct descendant of the gods which has been revived and repaired and strengthened during the last half-century in Japan itself, that his “divine right” may survive even in an age that is so completely in disagreement with such fallacies. Korean school-children especially are subjected to this form of propaganda, so similar to the German school- and pulpit-made Kultur of kaiserly days. The requirement that their children in government schools shall not merely salute the banner of the rising sun at frequent intervals, but shall bow down daily in what is virtually worship, however much the Japanese may deny it, before a picture of the mikado, is one of the sorest points with the Koreans. A modicum of intelligence should tell any people that such methods are out of date and much worse than useless. The new Shinto shrines on hilltops all over Korea, with their newly peeled torii before them, look like late and exceedingly weak rivals of the Christian churches which dot the peninsula.

Until very recently all Japanese officials in Korea, including schoolteachers, wore uniforms and carried swords! Picture to yourself how much more handy the latter would be than a ferule. But Japanese influence on the rising generation would be greater if there were not such a discrepancy in the rights of schooling. With seventeen million Koreans and less than three hundred and fifty thousand Japanese in Korea, the 65,654 Korean children who find accommodations in government schools represent something like one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of the Korean population, while the 34,183 Japanese youngsters in school are one tenth of the sons of Nippon in the peninsula. Yet the Government still hampers to a certain extent private, and especially missionary, schools. The Japanese have brought many improvements, say the Koreans, but for whom?

Silk, tobacco, salt, gin-seng, to some extent beans, and in a certain sense prostitution, are government monopolies in Korea. The Japanese seem to bring immorality and “red lights” and disease wherever they take root, and to adopt a callous, cynical attitude toward this matter which marks them as closely related to the French in at least that one point. Thirty years ago, say missionary doctors, before their war with China brought the islanders to the peninsula in any great number, the diseases of prostitution were virtually unknown in Korea; now they are widely prevalent. As is their custom, the Japanese have established yoshiwaras in every city of any size, with Korean as well as Japanese inmates—Chinese also in the zone they control in Manchuria—and while these are not exactly government owned, the protection accorded them, the official regulation of them, and the large income in the form of taxes derived from them makes them virtually so.

A Japanese policeman in spotless white summer uniform and sword, relieved by a blood-red cap-band which is said to be symbolical, is to be found in any Korean gathering, even in the utmost corner of the peninsula. The traveler will probably not be in Korea long before he sees one or two such officers driving to prison a Korean with his arms tightly bound with ropes, the loose ends of which serve as reins. This is an old Oriental custom, but one feels that it could, to advantage, yield to something a little more modern and reasonable, a bit less conspicuous. In August, 1919, the police force under an army lieutenant-general virtually independent of civil authority was replaced by a gendarmerie or constabulary directly responsible to the new governor-general, Baron Saito. The latter is widely admitted to be a superior official, with the best of intentions and a high grade of ability. But tales of oppression by subordinates, and cruelties by the police, persist even under his comparatively beneficent rule. The time-honored excuse that “excesses of police and gendarmes do not have the approval of higher authorities” is out of date; if higher officials cannot curb those under them, they are equally to blame. Baron Saito’s Government seems to recognize this and has changed the formula to “It cannot be true that the police still beat prisoners, for there is a law against it.” Definite cases of persecution and torture still turn up from time to time, but the victims are so cowed that they dare not report the matter to higher authorities, and a fluent lie by the police involved settles an investigation, since the word of a Japanese is always accepted over that of a Korean. An American missionary who had reported many cases of persecution to the present governor was asked to bring the next victim in person. But when he suggested to a man who had sneaked in to see him, badly cut up and mottled in black and blue from head to foot, that he go and show himself to the governor-general, the fellow all but fled at the bare suggestion. Word would be sure to get back to the police of his own province, he insisted, and he would be manhandled worse than ever when he went home. True, gendarmes who misbehave are sometimes court-martialed, which sounds to the average civilian like something dreadful, but those of us with a little military experience know how often a court martial is a synonym for a whitewashing, unless it is the sacred army itself which has been wronged.

The Korean method of ironing, the rhythmic rat-a-tat of which may be heard day and night almost anywhere in the peninsula