"The Jap is the slant-eyed Hun of the Orient. He has a slant-eyed ethics, a slant-eyed morality, a slant-eyed honesty, a slant-eyed social consciousness; a slant-eyed ambition, a slant-eyed military system; and a slant-eyed mind!" said Peter Clarke Macfarlane, the well-known author and lecturer, one day when I was interviewing him on the Japanese question.
"That's pretty strong, Mr. Macfarlane, in the light of your usual conservatism," I commented.
"I say it carefully and after much thought. It is said to stay said so far, as I am concerned," he added with finality.
This was also my own opinion, after spending three months in Japan and Korea, another month in China; and another month or two in Manila; catching the angle of Japanese leadership from every slant.
And after due consideration, and after a year to think it over carefully, I am here to say, that I never saw, or heard of anything worse happening in Belgium under German rule than that which I saw and heard of happening under Japanese rule in Korea, Siberia and Formosa, while I was in the Orient.
Suffice it is to say, at this point, that the Japanese is hated by the whole Orient. I do not believe that the German Hun in his worst day was ever hated more unanimously for his inhuman practices than is the Jap Hun hated by the whole Orient to-day.
"Is it getting better or worse?" I am asked constantly.
"Worse!" I reply, and this reply is backed up by interviews I have had with returned Korean missionaries.
I found the Japanese scorned and hated from one end of the Orient to the other. As far south as Java, as far east as the Suez; as far north as the uttermost reaches of Manchuria and Siberia; as far this direction as Hawaii.
For instance, after I had been away from Korea for six months and had come back to America I met a most conservative missionary in the Romona Hotel in San Francisco. The last time previous to that meeting that I had seen him was in Korea itself.