Flash-lights from the Seven Seas

by William L. Stidger

"No! I cannot do that! The gendarmes are very revengeful!"

I know personally of a Korean preacher who has done no greater crime than to attend a meeting at a dinner given for released Korean prisoners. He was arrested and kept in jail for three days, just for attending that dinner.

Another preacher with whom I talked was suspected of collecting money eight months after the March Independence Movement. When he heard that the Japanese police were coming for him he fled. This angered the police. They appeared the next morning at three o'clock at his home. There were only the mother and a twelve-year-old daughter left. First the gendarmes burst in the frail doors with the butts of their rifles, and then from three o'clock in the morning until daylight, they beat and tortured those two helpless Christian Korean women; kicking them all over the house until they were unconscious. These two Korean women were in bed for two weeks because of that night's experience and were not able to walk for a much longer period than that.

And these women were educated, cultured women. They had committed no crime. It was simply because they did not know where the father was.

Later the father and son were arrested. They were beaten cruelly in the process of arrest although they offered no resistance. The son later said to me, "I could stand it to be beaten myself and even to see my father beaten but the unbearably cruel thing was to know that they had beaten my innocent mother and sister when no man was there to protect them."

I cite this instance because it happened eight months after the Independence Movement, and three months after the so-called reform Government of Baron Saito had been in effect and after the Japanese Press had said to the world that all cruelties had ceased.

A case of frightfulness that was called to my attention; which seemed to me to be the very essence of cruelty was that of the moral terrorizing of an educated Korean Pastor, whom the police merely suspected of having had something to do with the Independence Movement. They had no direct evidence but submitted him to months of moral terrorizing which was the worst I have ever heard of.

For months at a stretch they would suddenly appear outside of his home and thrust their bayonets through his doors. Then they would go away without saying a word. He had absolutely no redress. If he had complained, he would have been thrown into prison.

One of the most reliable missionaries that I met in Korea told me of how one morning the policemen came to a church in northern Korea during the hour of service. They broke eighty windows, arrested fourteen men, smashed the little organ with their gun butts, smashed a beautiful lamp, tore up the mat seats from the floors, and burned them in front of the church.

At the funeral service of another young Korean preacher, Pak Suk Han in Pyeng Yang, hundreds of Japanese soldiers appeared with drawn bayonets just to terrorize the people. The church was full of Japanese officers with drawn swords.