The recent massacre of Koreans in Manchuria by Japanese soldiers illustrate the Japanese spirit.
This same policy of frightfulness is carried on in Formosa and in Siberia and wherever the Japanese army and gendarme system has authority. It is worse than anything that the Germans ever did in France or Belgium. It has its only parallel in the dark ages.
I told Baron Saito, Governor-General of Korea this in an interview. He wanted to know what America thought of Japan's rule in Korea. I said: "America and the whole civilized world is stirred with indignation at the Japanese rule in Korea. There has been nothing like it since the dark ages." Then I read him a quotation from an editorial in Zion's Herald, a church paper published in Boston with virtually those words in it.
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My friend, whom I met first in France, when he came back from. France was sent to Siberia as a Captain in the American Army.
I met him in Manila just after he had returned from Siberia. He, in common with all Americans who had seen the Japanese methods of frightfulness in Siberia, was filled with hatred.
"One night," he said, "a company of Japanese soldiers entered the little village six hundred miles north of Vladivostok where we were located. They announced that they were hunting for Bolsheviks.
"They did not find any in the little village, although they ruthlessly broke down every door of every home in that village. Then they went out to a sawmill about three miles from town and brought in five boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen.
"After torturing these boys in an old box car for two days, hanging them up by the thumbs with their arms behind their backs until they were unconscious; and then forcing salt water, hot water, cold water, and water with pepper in it down their nostrils, alternately; and other added cruelties; they announced to the village that they would release them that night on the public square."
"Did they do it?" I asked anxiously, for I was stirred to my soul's depths with his narration of cruelties in Siberia.