The interior of a Korean house
Close-up of a Korean “jicky-coon,” or street porter
At the first suggestion of rain the Korean pulls out a little oiled-paper umbrella that fits over his precious horsehair hat
Like his neighbors, the Korean eats with chop-sticks, but he uses a flat metal spoon with his rice. This grain is the basis of the better-class meal, but is not so highly polished as in Japan; and it is too costly for the common people, who replace it with cheaper grains, especially millet. What may seem a hardship is really a blessing. The poverty which denies them some of the refinements of the table imposes upon the people of Korea a more healthful diet than that of their island neighbors; in the mass they are more sturdily built; if all other signs are insufficient one can usually distinguish a Korean from a Japanese by the excellence of his teeth. Besides his beloved kimshee, no Korean meal is complete without a pungent sauce made from beans pressed together into what looks like a grindstone and then soaked in brine, a sauce into which at least every other mouthful is dipped. Meat is more often eaten than in Japan; fish, as generally. But tea is not widely used; in its place the average Korean uses plain water, or the water in which barley or millet has been cooked, or, best of all, sool, cousin of the fiery sake or samshu of the neighboring lands. Then come a dozen little side-dishes,—pickled vegetables, some strange, some familiar to us, cucumbers cut up rind and all, green onions, and some distant member of the celery family, all immersed in vinegar-and-oil baths, slices of hot red peppers, tiny pieces of some hardy tuber, brittle sheets of seaweed cooked in oil until they look as if they had been varnished, a jet-black kind of lettuce, and other odds and ends for which there are no equivalents in our language. Sugar is hardly used at all, and the adaptable traveler who learns to be otherwise satisfied with a native dinner usually rises to his feet with a longing for a bit of chocolate or some similar delicacy.
It is curious how geographical names often persist in our languages of the West long after they have become antiquated and even unknown in the places to which we apply them. The name “Korea,” for instance, means nothing to those who live in the peninsula we call by that term; nor for that matter did the word “Korai” from which we took it ever refer to more than a third of the country, and that long centuries ago. Ever since they absorbed the former kingdom the Japanese have striven to get the world to adopt the native name “Cho-sen” (the “s” is soft), a word already legitimized by several hundred years of use. But the world is notoriously backward in making such changes; perhaps it is suspicious of the motives of Japan, and a bit resentful at her attempt to render whole pages of our geographies out of date. Yet there is nothing mysterious or tricky in the wholesale alterations in nomenclature which she has wrought in her new possession, though there is often irksome annoyance. Every province, every city, almost every slightest hamlet has been given a new name; but this has come about as naturally as the Frenchman’s persistent obstinacy in calling a horse a cheval. It is a mere matter of pronunciation. A given Chinese ideograph stands, and has stood for centuries, for a given town or village of Korea. The Korean looks at the character and pronounces it, let us say, “Wonju”; the Japanese knows as well as we know the word “cat” that the proper pronunciation is “Genshu”—and there you are. It is hardly a dispute, but it is at least a new means of harassing the traveler. If he is American or English, or even French or German, for that matter, he will find that nearly all his fellow-countrymen resident in the country, mainly missionaries, have lived there, or been trained by those who have, since before the Japanese took possession, and that they know only the Korean names. If he has a guide-book, which is rather essential, it is almost certainly concocted by the new rulers or under their influence, and insists on using the Japanese names. So do the railway time-tables, all government documents, and the like. Thus he discovers that it is almost impossible to talk with his own people, at least on geographical matters.
“Have you ever been in Heijo?” he begins, with the purpose of pumping a compatriot for information on that second city of the peninsula.
“Never heard of it,” replies the old resident, with a puzzled air, whereupon the new-comer gives him up as a hopeless recluse and goes his way, perhaps to learn a few days later that this very man was for ten years the most influential foreigner in that very city, but that to him it has always been, and still is, “Ping Yang.” Thus it goes, throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula, so that the man who would mingle with both sides must know that “Kaijo” is “Song-do,” that “Chemulpo” is “Jinsen,” that what the guide-book and time-table call “Kanko” has always been “Ham-hung” to the missionaries, that every last handful of huts in Korea is known by two separate and distinct names, though the erratic slashes with a weazel-hair brush which stands for it in the ridiculous calligraphy of the East never varies. Long before his education has reached this fine point the traveler will have completely forgotten his resentment at finding, as he rumbles into it at the end of a long summer day, that the city he has known since has early school-days as “Seoul” is now officially called “Keijo.”