It is striking how completely Korean Cho-sen remains to its very borders. Even in Yuki, where the coasting-steamer that brought me down from Vladivostok stopped to load logs, town and people were quite the same in appearance, manner, and customs as in Seoul or Fusan—and Japan had just as firm a grip. One might have suspected, from the long array of flags out through the little frontier village, that nearly all the inhabitants were Japanese, but it turned out that all shops, in honor of some mikado-ordained holiday, had been required to put up the rising—or is it the setting?—sun.
Seishin, a more important port farther southward along the coast, is picturesquely placed among foot-hills, and even has a railway, though this begins miles away behind it. There are no rickshaws for weak-legged passengers either, though little hand-run flat-cars operate on a tiny track, the spinning along on which on the edge of the bay by moonlight is delightful. Few thatched roofs are to be seen along the isolated little segment of the Korean Railways between Seishin and the garrisoned border town of Kainei, but tiled, Chinese-looking houses set down almost out of sight in patches of corn, and many mountains and tunnels, though also some fair valleys. Big chimneys made of hollowed logs of wood sprayed at the top by the fire that sometimes reaches them stand high above every mud-stuccoed dwelling in this region. Even there the landscape is almost treeless, except for a certain growth of small evergreens in patches here and there, though it is not far beyond to the great forests of the upper Yalu. Among them rises the rarely uncovered head of the Ever-White Mountain, and there are genuine tigers of Bengal and other game worthy the best sportsman’s skill in the wooded labyrinth of mountains about it. Kainei itself is quite a large town with many Japanese, thanks largely to the great barracks that seemed to swarm with soldiers. Part of an unambitious wall crawling along the foot of the hills not far north of it marks the ancient boundary between Korea and Manchuria, and in this midsummer season the town was hot beyond description in its pocket among the mountains. There were many little straw-built watch-towers standing stork-legged at the edges of the ripening crops, and up a hillside at the edge of town was a pathetic little Shinto shrine trying to force its way into the life of the people.
A village blacksmith of Korea. Note the bellows-pumper in his high hat at the rear
The interior of a native Korean school of the old type,—dark, dirty, swarming with flies, and loud with a constant chorus
In Kongo-san, the “Diamond Mountains” of eastern Korea
The monastery kitchen of Yu-jom-sa, typical of Korean cooking