Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

The Japanese learned considerable from the uprising of 1919, but they still have something to learn. There are officials yet who advocate fines and flogging for Koreans who refuse to hoist the flag of Japan on national holidays. A modicum of common sense should teach any people that a national flag is a symbol of patriotism the display of which should be only an expression of free will, that patriotism can never be forced into the hearts of a people, and that any false show of it is much worse than worthless. Even shops which close as a sign of protest against certain Japanese doings are compelled by the police to open their doors. When the warship Mutsu anchored in the harbor of Chemulpo, the port for Seoul, every visitor who went on board was compelled to salute the common sailor on sentry duty at the gang-plank, who barked like an enraged bulldog at any one who did not perform the ceremony with the deepest solemnity. Until they cure themselves, or are cured, of this ridiculously Prussian point of view on matters pertaining to their national life naturally the Japanese will not be able to see that it is silly to speak of the “wickedness” of trying to change, or even of talking of changing, a given form of government, that as a matter of fact any form of government is no more sacred than an old pair of shoes that has served the wearer moderately well.

We of the West should not forget, however, that the “white peril” has been a much more actual thing to the Japanese than the “yellow peril” ever was to us. Korea was not only a convenient spring-board for Russia and the whole white world behind her, but it was a greater source of danger to Japanese health than Cuba in its most yellow-feverish days ever was to us. Old residents paint a distressing picture of pre-Japanese Seoul—narrow streets plowed up into bullock-cart ruts, no general means of transportation except one’s own feet, however deep the mud, corpses of those dying of cholera left before any “rich” man’s house, forcing him to bury them. The Korean royal family was “liberally provided for” and left in possession of their palaces and their titles in perpetuity on condition that they would not interfere in any way with the new Government or the people of the peninsula. The sop of titles of nobility was thrown to influential Koreans who were likely to make trouble, and seventy-six new peers stepped forth from their mud huts. The Japanese claim that they spend ten million dollars a year on the occupation of Korea, that with its need of schools, roads, trees, sanitation, and many other things the peninsula is a great burden to them. “Though it is treason to say so now,” a high-placed Japanese in Seoul assured me, “Korea will eventually get her independence, as soon as she can stand on her own feet and protect herself—and us—from the north.” Possibly this was mere prattle meant to throw me off the scent, but I have met some Japanese intelligent enough sincerely to believe in this eventual solution.

The American and European merchants in Korea think that the Japanese did on the whole better than any one else could have done in handling the situation, and that the Koreans cannot possibly govern themselves. So, for that matter, do most of the missionaries. Russia would have forced the Greek church upon the people, they say, but would have left the lowest form of inefficient and unsanitary burlesque on government. They would virtually have encouraged the persistence of ignorance and filth that made the Hermit Kingdom in every sense a stench to the nostrils of the world and a land of but two classes of people, the robbers and the robbed. “If Japan were to say to us to-morrow, ‘Here’s your country; run it yourselves,’” said a man who was trained to become prime minister under the old régime, “there are not bright men enough in it to form a cabinet.” The people have sometimes been made to suffer, the merchants go on, in such matters, for instance, as the taking of their land to build roads—for in old Korea as in China to-day highways were mere trespassers on private domain; but on the whole Japan has been no rougher than the United States or England in the countries they have taken over.

The agitation of Koreans for independence, the foreign laymen in the peninsula claim, emanates from self-seekers in foreign lands, and from the young students of mission schools, “especially American mission schools”; and the two “provisional governments,” one in the United States, and one, which has been in existence since the annexation, in Shanghai, do not at all represent the wishes of the Korean people as a whole. As it is, they are ground between the two millstones of the Japanese on the spot and these exiled governments, which send agents to make life miserable for those who fear one or both of them may some day come into power. Even the old politicians and office-holders are content, if we are to believe the men of commerce, now that even the Japanese have discovered that few military chiefs are of a type to make successful colonial governors, and that their subordinates, especially of the lower ranks, are almost always tactless, to say the least. But business men have a tendency the world over to praise anything that tends to keep “business as usual,” and one will probably come nearest the truth by striking a balance between their impressions and those of the missionaries, crediting the latter with somewhat more sincere, because less self-seeking, motives.

Whatever his personal opinion on the usefulness of foreign missions, no one with his eyes half open can set foot in Cho-sen without being impressed by the Christian influence, or at least by the number of missionaries, converts, and churches. He may be highly amused at the many subdivisions of that faith, by reason not merely of minor matters of creed and national lines but of such political cleavages as that caused by our Civil War, so nearly obliterated at home, which bewilder the natives like a countryman in a department-store with the wide choices of salvation offered them by—to mention only some of the American varieties—the “Northern” Presbyterians and the “Southern” Presbyterians, the “Northern” and the “Southern” Methodists, the Kansas Baptists and the Oklahoma High Rollers, for all I know, all guaranteed to give equal satisfaction. But the very intensity with which native converts regard these arbitrary lines of division, much slighter among the missionaries themselves, and the care which “Bible women” and country pastors take to keep their charges from wandering into any adjoining heretical sheepfold, is an evidence of the genuineness of their new beliefs.

Whether or not Christianity is the one and only true faith, it seems to be an established fact that it thrives under persecution. Protestant mission work began in China in 1808, in Japan in 1859, but not until about 1888 in Korea; yet there is to-day only a scattering of native Christians in the two former countries as compared with the hordes of them in Korea. Many towns, even Ping Yang, second city of the peninsula, are almost more Christian than “pagan”; and the missionary boast that Korea will be a Christian land within a generation or two does not sound so wild as many another statement that drifts to the ear of the naturally skeptical wanderer. There is some evidence to show that this rapid progress is considerably due to those very Japanese who are least eager for the Christian faith to spread. The law of Japan and Korea grants absolute freedom of religious belief and practice, but even the passing layman can plainly detect something very close to persecution of Christians by some of the Japanese authorities in the peninsula, though it be only unconscious and unintentional, which it probably is not. While the Catholics have been there much longer, and have often carried things with a high hand, it is the Protestants in particular, and especially the American missionaries, who seem to have won most of the Japanese ill will. This I believe to be almost more because of the fact that they are Americans than because they are missionaries. As Americans they just naturally resent the lack of human liberty, of “self-determination,” to use the catchword of the hour, which Japanese rule in Korea means. The opposite point of view is bred in their bones. Though they never opened their lips on the subject, their mere unconscious attitude, their negative lack of approval of the existing state of things politically, cannot but seem to the Koreans an approval of their own opposition to the Japanese. Obviously, the study of American history, even of American literature, in the mission schools adds to the discontent of young Koreans with the present status of what was once their own country, even though the teachers lean over backward in the effort not to mix academic and political matters. In fact, while the missionaries might deny it, it may be that the Koreans are rallying in increasing numbers about the American sponsored churches as much under the mistaken impression that the Americans are secretly sympathetic to the throwing off of the alien yoke, even by violence if necessary, as from the conviction that the American brands of salvation are the only sure passwords at the celestial gates.

At any rate, the Japanese seem to have concluded that American missionaries were behind the independence movement of 1919, and that they are still not to be entirely trusted. Now, I am as certain as I am of anything in this uncertain world that not a single American missionary was in the conspiracy of the “Mansei” demonstration. A very few may have known something about it, at least have felt in the air that something was coming; but it was no business of theirs to turn tattletales and run to warn a Government which had usurped since most of them came to Korea and had not treated them with any notable kindness, besides having what should have been an ample supply of its own spies to pick up such information. But the Japanese have not our way of thinking. They are ready enough to have the missionaries render unto Cæsar what belongs to him by keeping out of politics, but at the same time they seem to expect them to lend a hand to the extent of passing on to the authorities any hints or rumors that may be of use to them.

However, the independence demonstration and the unwise acts it brought in its train have trailed off into history. The more intelligent Japanese officials seem to have seen the light and acquitted the American missionaries of any active and conscious part in it, and the new governor-general and his immediate aids even sometimes call them into conference to get their point of view on subjects in which they are involved. But there is still an undercurrent of something akin to persecution of the American churches. As in the case of the persistent rumors of police floggings in spite of the new law forbidding them, it is impossible to make certain whether this is due to deliberate disobedience of orders by recalcitrant subordinates, to secret instructions at variance with those made public, or to pure stupidity, of which the Japanese have their liberal quota. In every mission town there is a detective in charge of matters pertaining to missionaries. He attends all services, comes hotfooting it whenever a foreigner stops even for lunch at a mission, demanding information concerning him back to the nth degree of absurdity, asks the future plans of the church almost daily, and other stupid and impertinent questions. In some districts the police still literally hound the church—demand lists of all contributors, send spies to stand at the church door and take note of every Korean who enters, burst noisily in during prayer, order new women converts not to attend services. Even the missionaries strike one as being rather afraid of the police, though this may merely be due to their strenuous efforts to avoid giving further offense and to come more than half-way toward established friendship with the political authorities; it can easily be imagined how native pastors and the simple converts are affected by a brutal attitude.

A chicken peddler in Seoul