Corea: The Hermit Nation

by William Elliot Griffis

The son of the soil is superstitious to the last degree. He lives in constant terror of the demons and spirits that overpopulate earth, air, and water, for he is without the protection that the certainties of science or the strength of pure religion furnishes. No unifying, uplifting, and inspiring knowledge of one God is his. His thatched hut or mud-floored hovel is a museum of fetiches. Often he will give the best fruits of the fields to what seems to an alien a mass of straw or rags. The sorceress thrives like a fat parasite on the farmer, getting well paid for her songs, dances, incantations, and presence at the feasts. Yet the Corean enjoys the religious festivals. He is at least just to himself, while professing generosity to the spirits. He honors the gods but ultimately puts the well-cooked offerings far from them—even into his own interior; for above all things, the worshipper is orthodox in his belief in a well-filled stomach. [[446]]

With such a people, both Confucianism and Buddhism become the grossest of superstitions. The Corean’s face is toward the past. He invokes and worships the dead, and to him the graveyard contains more than the future can bring him. Besides the extortions of the nobles, officials, and other parasitic or predatory classes, the expense of offerings to his dead ancestors amounts to many millions of dollars a year, far exceeding in their total the national revenue. In Seoul alone there are three thousand sorceresses, each earning at least $7.50 a month. The farmer is poor, but he is hospitable and liberal. He has untold reverence for learning and for rank, he loves flowers and beautiful scenery, but he is stupid in the presence of an innovation. His area of vision is bounded by the hills within the circle of which he was born. His chief recreation is in going to market, for, generally speaking, there are few shops in the peninsula, but there is a market every five or six days, where the natives exchange their products and their opinions. According to the state of weather conditions, the native is happy or suffers, a large harvest making all smile, a scant crop causing famine and hunger and the outbreak of banditti and rapine. Besides buying and selling, huckstering and gossiping, there are at the markets plenty of fighting and drunkenness as diversions. Going out for wool the farmer frequently comes home shorn, but he has had his fun, or rather a variation of deadly monotony. Furthermore, he is fond of a joke and loves to chaff his fellows.

As the country itself is governed out of the graveyard, and sovereign, court, and people are driven by imaginary demons and spirits, so the farmers, both as individuals, as families, and as clans, guard jealously and in fear the ancestral mounds with superstitious reverence. Hence one large element of village excitement is in quarrelling and fighting over graves. About fifty per cent of the cases brought before the country magistrates are said to be connected with these grave fights. These bitter struggles involve whole clans and result in bloodshed and loss of life. Even the dead are not allowed to rest in peace. The digging up of corpses and the tumbling of them beyond the limits in dispute is a common occurrence. This ghoulish activity is varied by an occasional abduction of widows or by other infractions of the law. Another large element of anxiety to the farmer is the protection [[447]]of the water supply for his rice-swamp. The damming of the stream above or the draining off of the water below may ruin his crop. The breaking of the mud boundaries, and the stealing of water from a neighbor’s field is mirrored in proverbs and folk-lore. It is sufficiently habitual to furnish a plentiful supply of pretexts for quarrels and fighting.

There are four classes of agriculturists. The lowest tiller of the soil is a serf, owning no land, working by the day or contract, and virtually bound to the glebe. The men of the next class, though owning no lands, work the farms of others on shares. These farm-hands and farm-tenants make up the great mass of the Corean people. They live in thatched mud huts, with enough plain food to keep them alive and often fat, but with scanty change of garments and few or no comforts of life. They are occupied during the working months from daybreak to twilight in unremitting toil. The third class consists of the small owners with possessions worth from five hundred to five thousand dollars and numbering three per cent of the farming population. In the fourth or highest class are the landed proprietors, the aristocracy of the land, the richest member being worth as much as four or five million dollars, with an annual income of at least a quarter of a million. Insignificant in numbers, they are mighty in power, for it is these great landowners who rule the realm, and most of them live in Seoul.

To the great mass of the people in Corea there is no motive for much industry beyond danger of starvation, and but little incentive to enterprise. Under old normal conditions now being slowly ameliorated, the official, the yangban, and the landed aristocracy, in a word, the predatory classes, seize upon the common man’s earnings and accumulations, so that it seems to him useless and even foolish to work for more than enough to support life, while as for the “civilization nonsense,” does it not mean more taxation? On the 13th of November, 1902, the announcement was made of the increase in land tax from $10 per measure of ground to $16 per measure. So argues the average man in Corea, the land long ruled by real oppressors and imaginary demons.

The researches of scholars have also revealed the actual economic conditions of the nation in the days of hermitage. Old Corea was not, as in feudal Japan, straitened in its production of food. [[448]]In the island empire only about one-twelfth of the soil was or could be cultivated. Hence Japan was rigidly limited in her food-producing area, so that the population, besides being kept down through such natural checks as famine, pestilence, storm and flood, was further diminished to fit the food supply by such artificial means as sumptuary laws, licensed prostitution, infanticide, cruel punishments, and frequent decapitation. In Corea, also, where the fertile earth, though formed to be inhabited and abundant in area of plain and valley, was neither properly replenished nor subdued, many checks upon population existed. Local famines were frequent and often long continued, and neither religion nor the means of transportation furnished the means of saving life to any large amount. Artificial checks on too rapid multiplication of humanity operated powerfully. The lesser care and kindness given to female children resulted in a heavy death-rate as compared with that of the boys, the cruel punishments and frequent torture and decapitation and the lack of incentive to industry all wrought together to make both the land and the human life on it of comparatively slight value.

The whole situation was changed when Corea ceased to be a hermit land and began to be fertilized by foreign commerce and ideas. Confronted by new methods of trade, science, and religion, the thinking native was summoned to thought and action. Into the Corean mind, long held in bondage by Confucianism, which degrades woman and narrows man’s intellect, the universal religion entered to compel the Corean man to think of other lands and people besides his own, to search his own heart, to attempt to make himself and his neighbors better, and to take a new outlook on the universe. The new doctrines delivered believers from the paralyzing thrall of demons and evil spirits, from ancestor worship, and from the sceptre held by the hand rising out of the grave. Into the Corea clamped as in iron bands by false economic notions entered the spirit of free competition. Into a land that knew no such thing as a foreign market the railway brings an eager purchaser to the farmer’s door, and by carrying his goods to the seaports it enables him to give to and receive manifold benefits from the world at large.

Already, through the energy of the canny islanders from the east, the crops in Corea have quadrupled, though under native [[449]]mismanagement this does not necessarily mean immediate benefit to the man on the soil, but rather to the official class, or to the landholder in the capital. It has been computed that the production of sixty million bushels of grain have thus been developed in Corea through the Japanese demand. Between the feverish enterprise of the Japanese on the one side and the tireless thrift of the Chinese on the other, “the good old days” of primitive routine are gone forever. Corea has 4,500,000 acres under cultivation, or about eight and a half per cent of her 82,000 square miles of area, so that 3,500,000 available acres await the plough. From her arable soil six millions more of population might easily find subsistence, and nearly ten millions of dollars of crops could be raised. The peninsula needs in every great valley the railway, which “quadruples the value of every foot of land within twenty miles of its line.” The line from Fusan to Seoul has already raised the value of town property in elect places hundreds of per cent and measurably all along between the terminals. This railway was begun in August, 1901, but though the work slackened for lack of capital, by December 1, 1903, thirty-one miles at either end had been built. The outbreak of the war with Russia revealed its military value and promise was at once given that by Japanese Government aid it would be completed with its thirty-one tunnels and 20,500 feet of bridges by the end of 1904. This Fusan-Seoul railway, 287 miles long, will traverse four provinces in the richest part of Corea, wherein are seven-tenths of all the houses and five-sevenths of all the cultivated area in the empire. Here also are the sites of the great fairs held six times monthly, the thirty-nine stations of the road being located at or near these places of trade, the total business of which amounts to over sixty-five per cent of the internal trade of the empire.

The Corean social and political system, sufficiently weak in hermit days, has shown itself unable to withstand the repeated shock of attack by eager and covetous foreigners, nor will it ever be able, even in a measure, to defend itself against the fierce and unrelenting greed of the strong nations intrenched upon its soil, except by complete reorganization. Both the outward forms and the inward spirit must change if the Coreans are to preserve their national identity. The nation has been the bone of contention between jealous and greedy rivals. One foreign government by [[450]]crafty diplomacy secures the right of cutting timber valued at millions of dollars, another gets mining concessions, others propose this or that industry or supposed line of production which depleted the treasury. The impoverished kingdom has not only wasted many millions of treasure in foolish enterprises, but is deprived of its natural assets in timber, metals, fisheries, and industries.

The problem of bringing Corea into harmony with her modern environment is only in some features like that of Japan, for there have been wanting in the peninsula what was so effective in Japan’s case. In the island empire, the long previous preparation by means of the infiltration of Western ideas during two centuries of communication with Europe through the Dutch merchants, the researches of her own scholars furnishing inspiration from their national history, the exercise during many generations of true patriotism and self-sacrifice for the public good prepared the island nation to cope with new conditions and situations. In the clash with the West, Japan came out victor. Corea has no samurai. She lacks what Japan has always had—a cultured body of men, superbly trained in both mind and body, the soldier and scholar in one, who held to a high ideal of loyalty, patriotism, and sacrifice for country. The island samurai enjoying the same prerogative and privilege as the Corean yangban (civil and military) not only abolished feudalism, but after giving up their hereditary pensions and privileges, joined the productive classes, while at the same time the Japanese merchants and mechanics were raised in the social scale, the pariahs given citizenship, and then all lines of promotion opened to all in the army, navy, schools, courts, and civil service. The fertilizing streams of foreign commerce, the inspiration that comes from brotherhood with other nations, and above all, the power brought to Nippon through the noble labors and object lessons of the Christian missionaries, enabled the Japanese to take equal place in the world with the nations of the West. Corea, on the contrary, by still allowing the existence of predatory classes—nobles, officials, and great landowners—by denying her people education, by being given to superstition from palace to hut and from sovereign to serf, remains still in weakness and poverty. What Corea above all needs, is that the lazy yangban cut their long finger-nails and get to work.