It would be strange, if it were not long since commonplace, to see how sharp national lines remain even among men who think they are working above nationalities, how completely even men of strong ideals succumb to their environment. The American missionaries in Japan say that there is some reason for the Japanese to be suspicious of the American missionaries in Korea. They agree with the officials there, who contend that those destined for mission work in the Korean field should first have a year in Japan, that they may judge more fairly the Japanese national point of view. Even those in Korea, after ten to forty years’ residence there, cannot agree on many of the points involved, so how can a mere passer-by be expected to get at the exact truth of the matter? He can merely decide that there is some reason on both sides, with perhaps a private opinion as to which one is most inclined to tamper with the scales, and let it go at that. Friction is gradually decreasing, as the Japanese and Americans become more able to talk together—generally in Korean; and as there is no doubt that Japan has the good of Cho-sen and its people at heart—as an integral part of the Japanese Empire—constant improvement may confidently be expected.
CHAPTER IV
OFF THE BEATEN TRACK IN CHO-SEN
Perhaps it is because I was properly “Japalacked” that I was able to wander at will about Korea by train, steamer, Ford, rickshaw, and on foot without the annoyance of that constant police supervision and the incessant showing of my passport of which many other travelers have complained. Once, long ago, when the Japanese were at war with Russia, I was arrested forty-eight times during thirty-six days of wandering through Japan, and while the experience was much more amusing than serious, there was nothing to be gained by repeating it. So I took the trouble this time to satisfy Japanese inquisitiveness at headquarters beforehand, and while I may have been, and probably was, under more or less surveillance during my six weeks in Korea, I am sure that many of my jaunts were known so shortly in advance even to myself that no detective could have kept constant track of me. Certainly no visible attempt was made to keep me from going when and where I chose, and talking with whomever I wished.
A missionary Ford carried me off once to the gaunt hills to the east of Seoul. Even the “great roads” in the interior of Korea are much like the caminos reales of Spanish America—“great” or “royal” only in the name they bear. In places there are what the Japanese call “highways,” but even these seldom have bridges worthy the name, some being mere sod-covered logs, others dirt-and-branch foundations under concrete, or nothing at all but the crudest of ferries. In the rainy season whole treeless hillsides wash away and force traveling missionaries to sell their Fords and walk home. Though the weather of Korea is on the whole much better than that of Japan, the floods of summer are naturally severe in a mountainous and deforested country. In Seoul it rained incessantly day after day during much of July and August, sometimes with barely half an hour of cloudy clearness from dawn till dark. Many villages and some thirty miles of railroad were under water, and countless bridges were made at least temporarily impassable. Men waded waist-deep in the flooded rice-fields, raking out the duckweed with which these were covered, and which would choke the rice when the water subsided. Clothing and shoes molded overnight. In other parts of the country, such as Ping Yang district, there was less rain than the peasants asked for, though the almost tropical heat was everywhere and incessantly in evidence.
Even one of the most fair-minded of guide-book writers speaks of the Koreans as “incredibly lazy”—proof that he saw much more of the old capital and its vacant-minded yangbans than of the country districts. If he had ever toiled for a day in the blazing rice-fields, even driven a bull knee-deep in mud through them, or carried a “jiggy” load along the narrow paths between them, he might have been of a different opinion. In a land where agriculture is the national industry, where four-fifths of the population still remain living among and tilling the hills of their forefathers, their horizon bounded by their own narrow valley and the nearest market town, there can scarcely be general indolence. The Koreans in the mass are not lazy; but life means to them something more than incessant exertion merely for exertion’s sake, and they amble along even at work as if there were never any hurry to do anything or get anywhere, quite the antithesis of the busy little Japanese. With some such foot-note as this to one accusation against them, it is easy to agree with the man who put it so well, that the Koreans “are garrulous yet inarticulate, stolid yet excitable, frugal yet improvident, lazy yet lashed by necessity to strenuous efforts.” A childlike people on the whole, one is likely to conclude from weeks of wandering among them, happy-go-lucky, with little tendency of laying up for a rainy day, a trait in which they are widely at variance with their present rulers.
In June the peasants were still spreading over the fields the decomposed oak-leaves used as fertilizer, but by early July the transplanting of rice began, soon to be followed by the weeding. Gangs pull up the closely grown seedlings and tie them in bundles, which they throw out across the fields to be planted with an expertness which reminds one that their national pastime, at least in pre-Japanese days, was stone-throwing. The earth-laden roots being much the heavier end, the bundles unfailingly land upright just where the thrower chooses to place them. A line of six to a dozen men and women move slowly across each flooded field, replanting the grasses one by one, and everywhere the green, low, flat country is dotted with hundreds of near-white figures rooting in the soft, flooded earth. That no space may be wasted, beans are often planted on the tops of the dikes between the paddy-fields. Frogs sing their lugubrious chorus far and wide, little realizing the unwisdom of betraying themselves to the beautiful ibis which feed upon them. At weeding-time whole villages join together in great gangs, with drums, fifes, brass cans, and all manner of native noise-producers, to make a festival of the task, singing as they weed. The men, stripped to the waist and burned a permanent brown, display leathery skins that glisten red-brown in the sunshine, like a well polished russet shoe. Yet many a peasant uses a yellow fan as he works. Where irrigation calls for the lifting of water from a ditch to the fields, a man leisurely swings all day long an enormous wooden spoon suspended in a little framework. If the work calls for shoveling, one man holds the handle of the implement and two or three others lift it by the ropes attached to the shaft, precisely like the people of the Lebanon far across on the opposite edge of Asia. The Korean is famed for his kindness to his bulls, almost his only draft-animals now that his savage little stallion ponies have become so scarce, and it is the commonest of sights to meet a peasant lugging his wooden plow on his own broad back while the bull strolls lazily homeward before him.
Korea is a land of villages, not of cities, nor yet of isolated peasant houses, so that the broad flooded country is usually unbroken clear to the foot-hills of distant ranges, unless a town, its thatched roofs slicked down to the women’s hair, intervenes. Here stands a stone monument with a roof over it to commemorate the wife who died of grief for her departed husband, or at least refused resolutely to remarry, a noble example, by Oriental standards, to all her sex. Farther on several upright granite slabs flanking the road announce themselves as erected by grateful citizens in honor of departed magistrates, though the deep-cut Chinese characters upon them usually express anything but the real public sentiment toward these village looters. Babies suckling like shotes mothers stretched out on the floors of open houses, babies eating great green cucumbers, skin and all, babies wailing as one seldom hears them in Japan, are among the most constant details of any Korean village landscape. Among the fixed customs of the country is the burning off of the hair over the soft spot of an infant’s head, and most Koreans preserve this little round bald place throughout their lives.
In July lettuce and green onions are everywhere, adding a still greener tinge to the landscape. Men sleep anywhere in the middle of the day, on the narrow paddy dikes, at the roadside, in the road itself, naked to the waist but with their ridiculous horsehair hats still in place. You will find them still working at dusk, however, and before the mists begin to rise under the morning sun. Koreans of the masses never seem to sleep, or to eat, all at once. The children have no fixed hours of going to bed, nor beds to go to for that matter, so that they grow up able to doze off anywhere at any time. Like the Japanese, the race shows the effects of poor beds and piecemeal, catch-as-catch-can slumber. One by one each member of the family lies down, still fully clothed, on the brown-paper floor of the house as the whim strikes him, and drifts away into more or less sound slumber, while all the domestic life steps in and out among and over the sleepers. No matter at what hour of the night one passes through a village some of its people will be squatting on their porches or chattering inside. As crops approach the ripening stage, little watch-towers, like thatched dove-cotes, rise high on their pole legs all over the country, and by night he who comes strolling along almost any road will hear some or all the family within beating the little elevated shack with a stick or singing some weird old song as a protection against the myriad evil spirits which roam the darkness.
I have said that the national pastime of Korea was—for it seems now almost to have died out—the throwing of stones. In Cho-sen this game more or less took the place of jiu-jitsu in Japan, and in the olden days whole villages lined up on opposite sides, led by their chief bullies and most expert throwers, the women often piling up stones within easy reach of the warriors, and the festivities did not end until several were badly injured, if not actually killed. Koreans still have the reputation of being the most accurate stone-throwers in the world, as more than one unwelcome stranger has learned to his dismay during some dispute with a group of villagers. Under the influence of both Japanese and American residents this faculty is being turned to another account, and Korean baseball teams have already beaten more than once the best aggregations which our countrymen in the peninsula can muster.
One has moments of doubt in Korea about the accuracy of the “survival of the fittest” theory. The Koreans are superior to their rulers in mental quickness, certainly in physique, and probably in some moral qualities. This straighter, stronger-looking race seem big men beside the pushing little dwarfs who have subjected them—though I found that the largest native socks and shoes were nearly two inches too short for my own by no means oversize Caucasian foot. That they are brighter, or at least of swifter mental processes, than the Japanese, I am personally convinced by numerous little episodes within my own experience. There was the guide I had in the Diamond Mountains, for instance, only to cite one of many similar examples. He was just an ordinary jiggy-coom, a porter with the Korean carry-all on his back; yet though neither of us knew a word of the same language, we had not the least difficulty in exchanging all the thoughts we needed to during a four-day journey, by signs and gestures. I have yet to see the Japanese who would not have failed dismally under similar circumstances, and not merely because gestures mean nothing to the people of Japan. We arrived one evening at a temple-housed hotel run by the government railways, and the Japanese in charge, though he had much more education than my guide, and spoke considerable more or less English, displayed his racial density to such a degree that I was forced to call in the Korean carrier as an interpreter. Entirely in the language of signs and a few monosyllabic place-names he caught the idea perfectly, and passed it on, in one tenth the time I had already spent trying to drive it through the skull of the son of Nippon.