Corea: The Hermit Nation

by William Elliot Griffis

In August, 1899, the written constitution of the kingdom was issued, the nine articles of which declare the absolute power of the King. It cannot be said that either the Coreans, the foreign diplomatic corps, or the world at large took this giving of a constitution as a very serious matter. To the special “imperial” envoy despatched from Seoul to Tokio, Japan flatly refused to promise the complete neutrality of Corea. Nevertheless, Corean subjects are expected to bow down and worship (either in the old English sense of the term or with more profound significance) the picture of the Emperor as in other pagan or semi-civilized countries. A memorial tablet and pagoda “to commemorate the virtues of his Majesty” was begun—on a day significant in the West—April 1, 1902. These will be in the main street at the junction of Palace Street in Seoul.

It was noted as a great event in the history of a country that has never given very serious attention to its high-roads, that Dr. W. B. Magill, an American missionary, drove a horse and carriage from Gensan to Seoul. A system of lighthouses was decided upon October 31, 1901.

The fiftieth anniversary of the Emperor’s birthday was celebrated December 7th, silver commemorative medals being given to each guest at the palace. A Corean band of musicians, trained by Mr. Franz Eckhart, a German, who arrived in the country February [[490]]19, 1901, played two pieces of foreign music very creditably to themselves and their instructor. On July 1, 1902, the Corean national hymn, an adaptation by Franz Eckhart, was published. This German musician had already made a good record in Japan.

On May 30, 1902, the Emperor entered the Society of the Hall of Aged Men, having completed the first year of the sixth decade of his life (51 years), the foreign representatives being entertained at breakfast. Prominent among these, in influence and ability, was the American minister, Dr. Horace Newton Allen, born in Delaware, Ohio, in 1868, and resident in Corea since the summer of 1884, when he introduced modern methods of healing and surgery. He accompanied the first legation of Chō-sen in Washington. There he was appointed secretary to the American legation in Seoul, and since 1890 has been the chief guardian of American interests in Corea, being made minister in July, 1896. During the time of the Boxer insurrection in China, when the movement threatened to spread into Corea, he was especially alert in precautionary measures of safety. Previous to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, he secured the presence of a guard of American marines in Seoul by which American rights, personal and commercial, were thoroughly secured.

Events during the year 1903 showed a steady movement toward an inevitable end and pointed to the impending crisis between Russia and Japan. The situation in Seoul was dominated by Yi Yong Ik and Yi Keun Tak, who were in close communication with Port Arthur and the Russian authorities at that place. Their high-handed financial and other schemes, in opposition to the Japanese efforts at securing a stable currency, came to naught after severe pecuniary loss to natives and foreigners and the serious disturbance of trade. The Russians, on April 11, 1901, had secured a twenty-year extension of timber cutting and prosecuted vigorously their advances in the north. They now refused to allow the Corean Government any supervision over their work of denuding the forests in the Yalu valley. In May one of the Czar’s gunboats anchored in the harbor of Yongampo, which the Russians called Port Nicholas, and soon after began what were believed to be fortifications. A guard of twenty-six Russian marines reinforced the legation in Seoul, shortly after the violation by Russia of her pledge to evacuate Manchuria. A serious riot in November between [[491]]Nipponese and Muscovite soldiers at Chemulpo foreshadowed the impending clash on a large scale in 1904. During December Russia’s influence at Seoul blocked all attempts of the foreign representatives to have Wiju (Ai-chiu) opened as a port of trade.

At this stage in the nation’s history, the once white-coated hermits who had hitherto lived under their own top-knots, and often under hats that were as big as a haycock, began numerously to go abroad as students. Scores of them have been in America and Europe and hundreds in Japan. In December, 1902, a party of nearly one hundred emigrants, men, women, and children, started for Hawaii. All of these were admitted, except eight who were sent back because of contagious eye disease. Other incidents showed healthful movement in a long-stagnant mass of population. Light and vision are coming to a people blind to nearly everything modern.

Of all the moral and reformatory forces at work, that of active Christianity leads. The missionary pioneers, Allen, Underwood, Scranton, Appenzeller, Heron, Gale, Jones, Hulbert, and others, mastered the language and opened the treasures of native literature and history. Already the list of aids to the vernacular and of their writings descriptive of country and people is a very respectable one. These works, the fruit of earnest toil, contrast superbly in the quality of truthfulness with the sketchy and ephemeral writings of tourists and hasty travellers. With other scholars and civil servants of various governments, they sustain the editor in furnishing the richly freighted pages of the Korea Review, and have formed the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, from which already several creditable volumes of “Transactions” have appeared to delight the serious student, who values perspective and tone in his mind-pictures of this once hermit nation.

Already the representatives of the Christian brotherhoods of English-speaking peoples have their row of graves in which sleep heroes, veterans, and some who “fell at the first fire.” Beginning in 1884, their prospective celebration of a double decennial, in September, 1904, was postponed under the clouds of war. Besides healing and helping, translating the Scriptures, and teaching the great uplifting truths which centre around the idea of one living and true God, gathering thousands of souls into churches and furnishing [[492]]Gospel nurture, they have taught the natives the grand lesson of self-support and self-propagation through a first-hand knowledge of the Bible. War, persecution, and manifold trials have tested and proved the quality of the converts, who in sincerity and power to stand in the midst of temptations are perhaps second to none in any field.

It was evident at the opening of the year 1904 that Japanese armies were once again to tread the soil of Corea, this time the war being not between China and Japan, but between Japan and Russia. Against the Colossus of the North and Russian rapacity, the Island Empire had a long list of grievances. As far back as 1861 a Russian man-of-war had, not without shedding the blood of its defenders, landed marines on the Island of Tsushima. There they had planted seed and begun the formation of a settlement looking to permanent occupation. In those days of hermitage, weakness, and fear, nothing could be done by the Japanese authorities at Yedo; but Katsu Awa, the Shogun’s most far-seeing statesman, called the attention of the British minister at Peking to this invasion, and a British naval force was sent to compel the Russians to retire. A few years later Russia took possession of Saghalien, after the usual preliminary of “joint occupation,” compelling the Japanese to be satisfied with the Kurile Islands below 50° 56′ of north latitude. This was in the year 1875, but long before that, Japanese statesmen, especially Okubo, had penetrated the designs of Russia. The formation, out of feudal elements, of her national army in 1871 and the first of this character since the twelfth century, was largely with a view of defending Japan against Russian and other aggressions. On the return of the Japanese embassy from its trip round the world in 1873, Okubo, Kido, and others opposed the Corean war project (as we have seen in Chapter XLVII), because a war with Corea then meant playing into Russia’s hands. Something of the popular fear of Russia over the Japanese nation, which hung like an advancing black cloud, was seen in the attack by a fanatical policeman on the Crown Prince, now the Czar of Russia, during his visit to Japan in 1891, but the Government in Tokio, even in the person of the Mikado, besides making ample apology, scrupulously maintained propriety in all dealings with Russia, at home and in Corea, living on terms of perfect friendship. It was therefore a stunning disappointment, [[493]]though a not wholly unexpected procedure, when Russia, in 1895, summoning to her aid the French and Germans, deprived the Japanese of the fruits of their victories in the war with China, by compelling the islanders to relinquish all territory on the mainland of Asia, and to be content with Formosa and an indemnity. Exhausted as they were by the war with China, yet had the Japanese been possessed of five battle-ships, they would have declared war upon Russia as an abominable intermeddler and aggressor. The force of circumstances required them to swallow their humiliation, but as the Japanese, any more than certain Christian nations, never forgive an injury, they began immediately to gird themselves for the coming and inevitable struggle with the Power that seemed bent upon their destruction. When the Boxer uprising in 1899 called forth the military energies of eight nations, the Japanese Government at first held back, lest its motives in being too forward might be questioned. When finally urged to lead the van of the allied armies of rescue, Japan sent 21,000 of her ablest and best equipped soldiers into the campaign. Their experiences on the march to Peking were invaluable to the Japanese, for through becoming comrades with the mujiks in the camps and on the battle-field, they learned that they had nothing to fear from such foes when arrayed against them in anything like an equality of numbers in war. The Japanese officer found himself a modern man in the presence of his equals, who were men steeped in mediæval methods of thought.

Steadily enlarging their navy and perfecting in every detail arms, ammunition, field equipment, army hygiene, and the physical development of their soldiers, the Japanese determined to stand for their rights, even though this might seem like Jack challenging the giant. No longer hermits on an island, which, having but a small fraction of arable fertile soil, could not feed its inhabitants, so that population had to remain stationary, the Japanese had become a nation of traders and manufacturers, with an annual increase of population of over 500,000 a year, with a total population of fifty millions, and with a foreign trade that had increased 543 per cent since 1890, with a total export trade consisting of 84.6 per cent of manufactured articles. With nearly thirty thousand Japanese subjects in Corea, most of them married and with homes, and with 10,000 of their people in Manchuria, [[494]]they took an interest in the affairs of Corea and Manchuria which was not like that of the Russians, chiefly military and strategic, but which, on the contrary, was commercial and vital. During the Boxer troubles, Russia sent a large army into Manchuria and finally took possession of the whole of that portion of the Chinese Empire. She promised solemnly to all the governments interested, to vacate the country on the 9th of October, 1903.