Corea: The Hermit Nation

by William Elliot Griffis

To the alien student, Buddhism looms as the chief civilizer and the mother of popular culture. It is certain that during its thousand years of growth and prosperity in the peninsula the people were as one flock led by one shepherd. They were trained in what was at least beautiful and human. Corea’s debt to Buddhism is unspeakable. Even to-day, in the land so often invaded, desolated, peeled, and scraped by Tartar, Chinese, and Japanese marauders, and raided by men from countries called Christian, almost everything that remains to touch the imagination, whether in architecture, rock sculpture, stone colossus, pagoda, in art, and even in literature, apart from erudition, is of Buddhist origin.

When, after A.D. 1392, the popular faith was banned, its temples, schools, monasteries, and works of art destroyed or doomed to decay, its priesthood socially outlawed and oppressed even to beggary, the people were left to ignorance and superstition and were as sheep without shepherds. They became the prey alike of the ruling classes and of sorcerers and fortune-tellers, who, though densely ignorant, lived by their wits and wickedness. Parasitic [[512]]spoilers of all sorts, from the palace to the hovel, thrived, while the people, the foundation of the state, existed on life’s narrowest margins. Confucianism, as made into a state ritual since 1392, and as interpreted and developed by the yang-ban, or educated and office-holding classes, meant neglect of the land, the grinding of the people’s faces, the permanent destruction of popular wealth and comfort, the paralysis of the motives to industry, and the creation of a standing army of inquisitors, office-seekers, and office-holders, and their satellites and hangers-on, with headquarters in Seoul. In place of the spiritual bread of Buddhism, the new régime offered a stone. In government, instead of the egg for nourishment, they proffered a scorpion—even chronic extortion. A great gulf was fixed socially between the men to whom education meant the stifling of original thought, a ban on mental initiative and the oppression of the people. Monopoly of office and privilege, as held by one class, meant systematic robbery of the populace, the Government itself being an engine of oppression by which fewer than one-quarter million yang-ban subsisted upon eleven million of the common folk.

When reform was called for which meant public benefit, apart from private rapine or individual advantage, manual as well as clerkly labor, continuous and unselfish toil with only slight pecuniary reward, the average high-class native proved a total failure. Despite the purging from the palace of several hundred women, and over a thousand male persons who drew salaries, the remainder within, or parasitic to royalty, proved worthless for the remaking of the nation.

Ever under the spell of the Chinese characters, saturated with the ideas of Confucianism run to seed, having only one ideal of life—selfish advantage and the subordination of the lower classes—devoted to their sensual enjoyments, their long pipes, and their liquor, to checker-playing, gossip, and elaborate idleness, the yang-ban during five centuries did nothing to develop the soil or the resources of the country. On the contrary, the office-holding class systematically hindered the development of wealth, or even thrift, by extortion, unjust taxes, and dishonest manipulation of imposts, which were paid in kind instead of in coin, by exactions or forced loans never repaid—usually under the menace and reality of beating, [[513]]torture, and imprisonment. One innovation under the Japanese rule, which made taxes payable in cash and not in kind, wrought infinite blessing to the people and carried consternation to the army of extortioners.

In the modern world-life, Japan and Corea are as necessary to each other as are man and woman. It soon became evident to the Tokio Government, after every step, that some stronger remedy than advice would be necessary to heal the age-old and deep-seated Corean disease that seemed as incurable as leprosy. Hence the measures of 1907, which put into the hands of the Mikado’s Resident-General still greater powers.

To this work of reforming Corea, Nippon gave her ablest son, one who, both in feudal and constitutional Japan, had dedicated his life to promoting the evolution of the modern man. The statesmanship of Ito was that of a lover of humanity, who might well, after long and multifarious labors, have taken the rest which he craved and which his physical condition demanded. Nevertheless, with his unique experience and amazing abilities, he applied himself with unremitting toil to lead the once hermit nation into the twentieth century. According to Ito’s motto, “The secret of statesmanship consists in securing the contentment of the people.” He was all the better fitted for his colossal task by having known so well the late feudal Nippon with its political diseases. Neglect of the people and of the soil, official falsehood, and class oppression were characteristic of both countries. Ito took all the more encouragement because life in Chō-sen was but the mirror of that in old Japan. Having fought belated feudalism and grappled with the new problems of a modern state in Asia, none was better equipped than he for the task of making a progressive nation out of a people whose mental eyes were set even further back in their heads than those of the Chinese.

For while China boasts of Confucius, Corea penetrates further into the primitive. She hails as the founder of her social order, Kija (Ki-Tsze, or Kishi, pp. 11–15), the distant ancestor of the Chinese sage. On this nursery fairy tale of the nation—since the peninsulars knew nothing of writing until, long after the Christian era, they obtained the Chinese ideographs—every Corean for a thousand years or more has been brought up. The early mythology [[514]]and legend of the peninsulars are about as trustworthy as those of the neighboring islanders, whose conceit of antiquity was once fully as great and whose official and orthodox chronology was fixed and published so long ago as A.D. 1872!

This myth of Kija, as the actual founder of civilization east of the Yalu, took its literary form only in the eighth century, when the Coreans had become saturated with Chinese ideas. Then the peninsulars, made acquainted with Chinese historiography, and having but one model before them, faithfully followed it (as did the Japanese also), the Coreans surpassing even the greater nation in pride of antiquity and in the glorification of heroes, who loom up in vaster proportions according as the unrecorded centuries multiply and recede into the past. Historical science has already begun to change this perspective of antiquity as surely as hospitals have furnished object-lessons in the law of cause and effect. Corean gods and demons, more numerous even than old Japan’s mythical menagerie and pantheon, are being steadily banished to the realms of fairy-land.[2]

Ito, scorning delights and living laborious days, continued the labors, but vastly enlarged the plans of his predecessors. First of all, having deported hundreds of the bad subjects of the Mikado and curbed the rapacity and brutality of his own countrymen, he applied himself unceasingly to healing the wounds of war, to indemnifying the unjustly impoverished natives, and to giving Corea what she never had—or, if possessed of, had allowed to lapse during the five hundred years of the dynasty that had destroyed the people’s religion and had done nothing for national development. A system of good roads, honest coinage and currency, courts and justice, popular education, afforestation of the mountains, improvement of the soil through scientific agriculture and reclamation of waste land, preventive hygiene, honest taxation and collection now exists. Ito cleansed the palace, separating the functions of Court and Government, lessening by fifty per cent. the number of persons paid from the public treasury, both male and female, removing as far as possible the king and his advisers from the great mob of sorcerers, fortune-tellers, geomancers, and others who [[515]]prey upon the Corean people. The deposition of the incompetent emperor and the installation of his son in power were followed by the education of the crown prince in Tokio.

The difficulties in the way of reform were appalling. The principal obstacles existed in the two classes of which Corean society is composed—oppressors and oppressed. The yang-ban, or privileged men, with more or less scholarship of a Chinese kind, seemed to have no conception of patriotism apart from pelf. Their chief trait was political vampirism. On the other hand, the supine attitude of the common people, accustomed for centuries to systematic oppression, was discouraging. To them even decent government, that is, the kind which could be tolerated to the point of rebellion, meant the grace of their masters and rule without robbery. One of the striking features of nearly every Corean town or city is seen in the long rows of tablets in stone or iron that celebrate the merits of “good,” that is, fairly decent, governors. A collection of all the local instruments of torture, stacked in one museum, would be impressive and furnish fuel for a vast conflagration.