KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
BT THE SAME AUTHOR
THE SCHOONER CALIFORNIA CURSED BE THE TREASURE THE CHILDREN REAP SHINJU
THE BODLEY HEAD
OLD KOREA
KOREA
OF THE JAPANESE
by
H. B. DRAKE
With twenty-four illustrations from photographs
LONDON : JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED NEW YORK : DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
First published in 1930
Made and Ptinied in Great Britain by William Clowes and Sons, Limited, London and Beccles,
TO
J. B. STUDENY
AND
J. F. HUSS
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. The Land of Morning Calm . . i
II. Graves and Funerals . . . • ^3
III. The Emperor’s Portrait ... 25
IV. Inns ....... 37
V. Kwan-Ok-San ..... 49
VI. The Untypical Englishman . . .61
VII. Keijo ....... 75
VIII. The Peking Pass ..... 89
IX. Seoul . . . . . . -103
X. Shops and Shopping . . . • 1^4
XI. Schools . . . . . .126
XII. The Case of Mary Pak . . .140
XIII. Sports Old and New . . . -153
XIV. The American Missions . . . *163
XV. The English Fathers . . . • ^75
XVI. Father Calistus . . . . .188
XVII. The English Lesson .... 200
XVIII. The Diamond Mountains . . *213
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Old Korea . . . . . . FrontispUce
FAOINO PAGE
By the Sea ....... 4
The Crystal Peak, The Diamond Mountains . 12
Fuel from the Hills ...... 16
The Royal Tombs, Kyung Ju . . . .22
As seen from the Grave-tops .... 24
The Inn Courtyard ...... 42
The Temple of Pul Kuk Sa, near Kyung Ju . 48
The Washing Women ..... 60
Winter ........ 70
Government House, Keijo ..... 78
The Summer Pavilion, The Imperial Palace, Keijo 80 The Throne Room, The Imperial Palace, Keijo . 82
The Jigi-man ....... 92
A Korean Street ...... 104
A Summer Retreat . . . . . .110
The Homes of the Squatters . . . .112
Beyond the City . . . . . .152
A Korean Garden ...... 162
Temple Painting: ‘‘The Spirit of the Mountain’* 186 A Temple Fantasy . . . . . .212
In the Diamond Mountains . . .218
The Hanging Temple, The Diamond Mountains 220 The Great Buddha, The Diamond Mountains . 222
KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
I
THE LAND OF MORNING CALM
IT is inevitable in writing on Korea that one should yield for a title to the seduction of this name. It is always done. It proves at least that one has trained through the country, travelling between Japan and Manchuria, with a possible “ stop off” at the capital. It links one up as a familiar with the slender band of whites who, by an amazing choice or a fantastic accident, have been marked out peculiar to live among the “ Top-knots.” For it is the authorized transla- tion of Chosun, the native name.
Yet one may deliberately select it, too, for its symbolism, for its irony.
When I first announced my intention of going to Korea I set my friends hunting bookshelves for atlases, some a little sneakingly, others in unashamed confession of ignorance. It was in the Black Sea, wasn’t it ? And was it spelt with a C or a K ? Well, you wiill find it on the map
2 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
hanging helplessly from Chinese Manchuria, with a slender grip to an edge of Russian Siberia, dangling down — but with a reluctant upward curl — ^towards Japan.
Again, is this symbolism, or is this irony ?
When, after a residence of two years, I was preparing to return to England, a trio of students, who had the sniggering manner of an illicit delegation, called upon me, and after an infinite and wearisome palaver besought me to write to the English papers and tell of the condition of their “ unhappy country.” They had ceased to snigger now. They were in bitter earnest. Their thick lips drooped. Their flat eyes widened. One might have said there was an incipient bristling in the straight fall of their long, black hair. I refilled my pipe, not knowing how to answer them, indeed, not knowing whether to laugh or weep. The childish miscon- ception that underlay their appeal had in it more of the tragic than the pathetic. They leant towards me, obviously disheartened at my silence, forlorn figures in their ill-fitting uniforms of summer grey, brass-buttoned, open at the neck, displaying brown and shirtless skins.
“ Please, yess,” one of them repeated, “ you write to Eengleesh papar, yess, ees it not so ? ”
England for them was so serene, so mighty.
THE LAND OF MORNING CALM 3
extending so beneficent a hand to the outcast and the oppressed, that a word from her would deliver them from their bondage, would make of their “ unhappy country ” once again “ the land of morning calm.” All that was in their minds, conceived in terms of magic wands and fairy godmothers. But I remembered my atlas- hunting fiiends ; and the refrain ran through my head, “ Is it spelt with a C or a K ? ”
What could I answer ? Besides, if I wrote at all, I wanted to tell of incredible mountains, of intense skies, of fantastic islands in transparent seas, of red-pillared temples set about with pine overpeering the ravines of granite hills, where one could bask beneath a beatific sun and commune with the Spirit of the Ancient Earth.
Well, I was as poetically remote from actuality as they. But one thing I saw clearly : the immense gap of ignorance which in spite of education, literature and travel still divides East from West. These students knew little enough of England, but England knows nothing of Korea. Yet Korea is worth knowing. It focuses so many problems, focuses them so clearly. One can study them there as though in a museum, each distinctly isolated, without irrelevant complexities, because the lines of life there are so simple. Problems political, national.
4 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
educational, problems as ephemeral as fashions in dress and architecture, problems as funda- mental as the clash of race and creed, stand out for one in separate relief ; but against a richly human background, and in a world wild and splendid that is the realization of romance.
One might begin where I broke off, frankly with no solution to offer, with those earnest- faced, brown figures forlornly uniformed in sign of servitude to an alien despotism. It was in 1910 that Japan formally annexed Korea, and with curious ill taste jubilantly celebrates the anniversary each year in the subjugated country. She does so with evident misgivings, because a few days before the event the prisons fill with suspected malcontents, who later are released without accusation and without trial, having suflTered no worse than a temporary confine- ment in an extremely up-to-date cell, and a daily baptism of cold water. Japan’s reasons for annexation, when officially expressed on paper, are an exquisite parody of similar European justifications, particularly British. She acted entirely from unimpeachable motives. Her altruism was sublime. Korea was shamefully misgoverned (she was) and Japan was conscience- bound to extend to her the benefits of modem
THE LAND OF MORNING CALM 5
progress (she has). But there is an Eastern savour in this Western wind. The Korean Year Book adds that Japan and Korea are like long-separated brothers who have at last been reunited. But the only brotherly element in their relationship seems to be that they mutually refrain from marrying into one another’s families. The plain fact, of course, was that Japan had no alternative. The Koreans as a people are marked down as a prey to any predatory power. Hate domination as they will, it is in their nature to be dominated. But a Russian or Chinese Korea would have been as dangerous to Japan as a German Ireland would have been to England in 1914. Japan acted in self-defence. It was quite impossible for her to have acted otherwise. And in any consideration of Korean independence one must take this as basic. But for me it would have been no sort of answer to those questioning students to say, “You are dear, delightful children. You hz^e the most beautiful smiles in the world. But unfortunately, as the gods have seen fit to arrange terrestrial things, there is a menace in your very charm and weakness. So your long-separated elder brother is obliged to step in and order your house.”
Yet that is the answer.
Indeed, one feels inclined to philosophize and
6 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
throw the blame on Heaven. The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. When the League of Nations has developed some scheme of International Hospitals for the feebler peoples Korea may be returned her independence. But her independence now would create a vacuum which would suck in Russia like a hurricane and China like a typhoon. Possibly America, with another rush of wind, preaching well-intentioned sublimities, but ineffectual for want of a resolute backing in guns. But the fault would not be with America. Remember our philosophy ; it is the gods who are to blame.
I ttuned the subject. I put banal questions to them. The three intent faces relaxed into wan smiles. I asked :
“ What will you do when you leave the University ? ”
Their expressions became thoughtful, which on the Korean face has the air of a thick wall enclosing a vacancy. The student whom I knew best of the three, and who bore the exquisite name of You Sea Cook (perhaps I could spell it Yu See Kuk), began to elongate his neck from his unbuttoned collar as a pre- liminary to replying.
“ Always I shall study,” he said.
1 might have anticipated the answer, because
THE LAND OF MORNING CALM 7
I had heard it before. I had travelled with Yu See Kuk. We had spent days together exploring old temples and nights together in Korean inns. I knew his ambition. He was the student of the family. His people slaved willingly on the land to maintain him in his aloof dignity. They would continue willingly to do so to the end of their days. Then he would live with his brothers. They would feed his wife and his children. And always he would study. He would read many books, squatting on the heated floor of his little room bowed over a tiny table. That was what Western education had achieved for him. He remained Eastern to the soul, but besides the Chinese Classics he would be able to read Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde and Galsworthy, and whoever else the succeeding divinities might be. Yet he was such a delightful boy. He told me, with the sweetest modesty, how at his return home for the vacations the whole village would meet him, coming miles along the road, bearing banners in his honour. It was a duty he owed, not merely to himself but to his people, that he should never stain his hands with labour. Always he would study.
And behind it there was no suggestion that the study might come to any serviceable fruition.
8 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
He was to sit in solitude and absorb ; but he would not be called upon to give. He would eventually die, blown full with learned air, and his memory would be revered. But, meanwhile, what of his country ?
Perhaps there was truth in the paper altruism of Japan.
“ And you, Pal Sung Yi ? ” I asked.
Pal Sung Yi had softly pouting lips and a very flat nose. He tilted his head a trifle, hugged a nervous knee, and replied with a delicious simplicity :
“ I shall write novels.”
Just as easy as that, you understand.
“ Then you will need to know many people and see many things,” I suggested.
His lifted brows, shaped to perfect curves above soft eyes of muddy brown, expressed a bewildered questioning.
Surely after studying for five years he would have read enough books to produce other books. Surely ... or of what use was the University ?
That was their outlook. And these, presumably, were the cream of Korean in- telligence. They had passed a difficult com- petitive entrance examination into the University. Their uniform commanded an almost slavish respect throughout the country. But they could
THE LAND OF MORNING CALM 9
see no farther than books for the sake of books. One might dislike the Japs as one dislikes a governess, but one shrewdly suspected that these little children needed some one with a sharp tongue and a stick to hand if they were to be fitted to this world as the gods have planned it.
Yet somehow, by writing to the English papers, I was to alter all this. But, then, I had written books. That very day they had handled them, passing them to each other reverently, admiring their blatant coloured covers. They would like to buy them, but how much did they cost? When I told them four yen, they exclaimed “ Ai-go ! ” and looked furtively to see if their hands were clean. Four yen, merely for a story. The English must be very rich if they could give four yen merely for a story. And their eyes wandering round my room declared the same respect. A perfectly vulgar room, without harmony, without proportion, set with a Daventry couch, some dilapidated chairs with carved arms and faded tapestry, a carpet folded back at one end to curb its unnecessary extent, a Japanese kakemono among Victorian prints and missionary calendars on the wall. It was dreadful ; but it represented wealth, luxury, splendour unimaginable to these students who lived in such hovels as one could see firom the
10 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
windows, clustering in curves about diminutive, foul courtyards, the thatched roofs aged to a dull purplish grey, for all the world like a cluster of mushrooms. But I belonged to a happy people. I wrote stories that cost four yen. Surely, if I would write to the English papers . . .
I turned to the third.
“ And you. Gin An Siki ? ”
Without the least despondency he replied :
" For me, I think, there is nothing.”
“ Ah, of course,” I said, remembering. “ You are a law student.”
Gin An Siki was a law student, and for him there was nothing.
Yet that was not strictly accurate. There are openings for Korean students of law. There are even Korean judges. There may be two Korean judges on a tribunal of three ; but the third is Japanese, he is president of the court, and he has the power of absolute veto. The Koreans are not encouraged to meddle in legal matters. The governess with the sharp tongue and the stick to hand will take all needful action.
So one swung sharply round to another view. One understood the complaint of the children.
And it was always so. At least it was with me. The problem is negative, not positive. It is so
THE LAND OF MORNING CALM n
easy to see where both sides are in the wrong, but not where they are in the right. One pities the Koreans, but knows them for incorrigible ineffectives ; one admits the Japanese efficiency, but dislikes its methods and applications. With the best will in the world no one can help the Koreans ; and with the best will in the world the Japanese will never leam how to help. Their arrogance, their officious- ness, their bursts of injustice, their subtlety, are so much more conspicuous than their superhuman and heart-breaking endeavours to uplift a people incapable of uplift. The Koreans clamour for freedom as children clamour for a world without grown-ups. But who’s to cook the dinner, and light the fires, and clean the rooms ?
But if one talks of cleaning !
The problem is best stated as a quadratic equa- tion with two answers — ^plus or minus one !
You «ee, they are irreconcilable.
My students trod with a clumsy carefulness as they left. In their own houses they would have removed their boots before entering, and to step with dirty boots on a carpet that would have cost them two years’ income was shocking to their sense of a decorous humility. But I saw them again at the station when I left the Land of
12 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
Morning Calm. They couldn’t speak to me there because the teaching staff stood by in force. But as I shook them by the hand the appeal was in their eyes, like a secret that had passed between us ; “ You write to Eengleesh papar, yess, and tell of our unhappee countree ? ”
I would take the first train back if the gods permitted, but not drawn by any sentimental pity, nor any virtuous indignation. I would go to the Diamond Mountains and climb to the Peak of the Ten Thousand Resemblances, and meditate on the stem and wonderful ways of our Mother the Earth.
II
GRAVES AND FUNERALS
IT is a commonplace that the East reverses our Western processes of thought. If I want to say to the egg-vendor, “ The eggs were all bad which you brought me yesterday,” I must express it in the form, “ Yesterday me brought eggs as for all bad were.” So before one speaks of Eastern life one must speak of Eastern death.
My most particular memory of a Korean funeral is somehow entangled with a certain Mr. Poole. Or more correctly. Dr. Poole. The doctorate I surmise, because it is difficult to believe that any American engaged in educational work would be without the undis- tingviished distinction. Dr. Poole’s exact line of education was training the Christian Young Men of China to take “ pictures,” or as we should say, photographs, and to play base-ball. He happened to be in Korea, because in the early summer of 1927 there had been a rather rapid exodus of missionaries from China. He was
13
14 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
lodging in the same house as myself. Within five minutes of introduction I knew the better part of his family history, and within ten he was unpacking albums of “ pictures ” in which he knew I should be “ in’erested.” As a matter of fact, I thought I should be, but Dr. Poole’s idea of albums seemed to be like Heaven’s idea of the world. Photographs good and bad lay crowded together without selection and without plan. The simple fact that a picture had come into being seemed a sufficient reason that it should find a place. So I rapidly grew weary of turning the pages, though arrested at times by some astonishing type, or by some glimpse of Chinese life so intimate that I marvelled at the impudence which made possible such familiar records. But when I looked at Dr. Poole I saw that it was not impudence. His face behind his dark-glassed, horn-rimmed goggles showed banally inexpressive as of a man to whom the suggestion would be merely unintelligible that there might be a certain indelicacy in thrusting a camera into a stranger’s face and “ shooting ” him because his particular stage of leprous decay was “ mighty in’ cresting,” or into a private apartment where devout figures crouched prostrate before an ancestral shrine. I thought of myself after innumerable paradings of the
GRAVES AND FUNERALS
15
streets, camera in hand, returning home without a film expended because of this hyper-sensitive shrinking ; but I did not explain this to Dr. Poole because I knew he would not understand.
Curiously enough, the immediate effect of his albums on me was to brace me to a ruthless rudeness. I would cast aside my absurd modesty, and make such records too for the delectation of my friends in England. So I took down my camera, and slinging it to my shoulder stalked with a determined air into the streets.
Every yard of them cried to be recorded. Dignified white figures passed sedately by, long-robed, stepping with a leisurely ease, bearing upon upright heads the absurdest hats in the world : flimsy, transparent structures of horse- hair, like i.he ghosts of inverted flower-pots on wide rims, uplift ed from the crown by a gauze cage t)rotectiv(-ly enclosing the hair drawn up into a twisted top-knot. The women, also in white, had i' ss dignity than the men. Their heads, rnosity uncoveied, showed black, oiled hair drawn flatly back and knotted on the neck. Their waists were bunchy from the clumsy enfoldings of their skirts. Their breasts, dis- coloured and unlovely, hung pendent beneath short bodices. They strode as though in a resolute neglect of feminine grace, with feet wide
i6 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
apart, with necks erect in the manner of those accustomed to bearing burdens on their heads, the wide, loose ends of their trousers beneath their skirts giving them something of the appear- ance of vultures. Children swarmed everywhere. Some were stark naked, some wore six-inch bodices beneath which their rice-filled stomachs rounded to amazing proportions. The elder children were dressed in exact counterpart of the women and the men, except that they wore no hats. They looked healthy and contented, though a scalp here and there was covered with distressing sores. They played shuttlecock, with ankles instead of bats. They played hopscotch, sturdily exact in their movements in spite of babies strapped to their backs, who slept in entire unconcern with heads drooping sideways from limp necks. They played with cards, with coins, with the refuse of the overflowing garbage- boxes, with stones, with dust, with mud.
All this I could readily have converted into pictures for albums. And the storekeepers squatting behind immense flat baskets of grain, and the sweet-sellers jangling great scissors, and the oxen loaded with fuel from the hills moving like animated stacks, and the men equally loaded looking from behind like towers of brush- wood precariously balanced on pantalooned
GRAVES AND FUNERALS 17
legs, and where water trickled in the open sewers the groups of washing women beating wet garments with a rattle of wooden clubs. Always and everywhere the washing women. . . . But my resolution ebbed from me. I couldn’t bring myself to level a camera into these solemn and patient faces. But I told myself, of course, that the light was unsuitable. Beneath such a blind- ing sun, such an intense blue sky, there could be no smooth, soft play of shadows.
I wondered whether such a consideration would daunt the zeal of Dr. Poole.
Then I found the crowd suddenly thickening. Policemen on horseback appeared around a corner, bullying the road clear. I heard a sad and measured chant. A double file of banner- bearers swung into sight, with coloured streamers inscribed with characters slung from long, slender poles — a funeral.
I furtively slipped my camera from its case.
The crowd pressed back to the sides of the wide street as the procession began to pass.
Behind the banners came lanterns, unlit, long, slight constructions of papered bamboo slung like the banners from the tops of poles. An interminable succession. And then the hearse — the palanquin, rather — ^with a couple of figures in front, completely veiled in sackcloth, borne on
c
i8 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
chairs. The palanquin was bright with colours, red, yellow, blue. High above the heads of the priests who walked beside it, it loomed like an immense and gaudy caravan, except that its swaying showed that it did not move on wheels. It required forty men to carry that dead body to its grave. They marched in step, in front, behind, to either side, their shoulders yoked beneath a framework of heavy crossing beams. And as they marched they chanted in a falling cadence a slow, repetitive lament.
The palanquin passed.
There followed a train of mourners, two and two, drawn in high rickshas. They were clothed in sackcloth, and on their heads were peculiar hats, also of sackcloth, but stiffened to rise sheer from the forehead and curl over to the back, giving the faces the appearance of ancient Egyptians in a fresco.
The sackcloth gave place to ordinary white as the lesser mourners appeared. One saw an occasional Western dress, or an Eastern robe svu-mounted by a straw hat or a trilby. And always to cither side a long string of boys and men, in round, flat hats of black felt, bearing bright tvreaths of artificial flowers supported on easehlike frames.
An endless, endless tmin.
GRAVES AND FUNERALS 19
Then suddenly another palanquin, complete with the veiled figures in front, with the priests to either side, with the mourners following, and the yoked and chanting bearers. But this was no second funeral. The first was make-believe, to cheat the evil spirits who are always on watch to do harm to a man treading the dark and unknown way. The real corpse was in the second palanquin, the real procession had only just begun.
There was no sign of sorrow. The hired men who carried wreaths and banners looked about them with complete indifference. The mourners on their rickshas were stolidly complacent as though hardly aware even that they were on view. The chanting of the palanquin-bearers came to sound less like a lament than a cadence to keep them in step. And it lengthened seemingly to miles.
But when it had all passed by, straggling into an indiscriminate rabble of street followers, I found my unused camera still dangling fix)m my hand.
The crowd about me set into a rapid chatter of expressive gutturals, forming into knots to discuss the wonderful affair. That must have been a very, very rich man. The white-robed crowd ! I remembered the significance of that
20 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
ever-present white. It was the Korean colour of mourning, adopted long ago as the everyday dress because Korean custom prescribed such an extended period of momning that it was simpler always to wear white.
On New Year’s Day the children might wear bright greens and reds, but the men and the women robed themselves daily in the livery of death.
I turned away from the streets — ^it really was hot — and in a few steps was on the hills. I rested on a granite rock within the shadow of a clump of twisted pines. Just below me on the slope the ground was mounded into little humps, grass-covered, with a foot-wom track threading up between. These were the dead, without flowers, without tablets, with no enclosing wall ; yet they ruled the land. They lay there as though with huddled-up knees, like discarded corpses after a battle, with the grass spread over them like a blanket. But no grave was forgotten. Once a year the living kinsfolk would come and scrape the earth bare and strew dust, and a man would rather have no one to feed him while alive than no one to do him such a reverence when dead.
Looking out across a valley I could see a cleared space on a further wooded hill. There
GRAVES AND FUNERALS 2i
was a solitary grave there, more imposing, more splendid. These were the poor, but that, I had been told, was the grave of a certain Lady An, an emperor’s concubine. She lay beneath an immense dome of earth, surrounded with guardian images, protected on three sides by a roofed wall, and set in front with a massive altar stone. It stood well up the slope, approached at the foot by a gate of posts like a football goal, faced by a shrine, and with a caretaker’s lodge to one side. She was well provided for. Lady An.
Her grave was an exact model, though in miniature, of other royal tombs. Always the enormous mound of earth, the images, the altar, and the wall.
One met these tombs at every turn. Tombs of the humble, tombs of the great. Magnificent trees grew about them, as about the monasteries and temples, in a country otherwise denuded of timber. Around the villages, above the rice- fields, the hill-sides came out in sporadic humps, singly or in clusters, as though from some curious disease of earth. Usually on waste land ; but sometimes one saw a grave in the middle of a paddy, and to that there would be some interesting tale.
The site is all-important. You must hold a
22 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
solemn feast, and pay a witch-dancer to select a situation for the grave. If she chooses to select it, possibly through august divination, possibly through spite, in the middle of your neighbour’s field, he has no choice, if he is a wise man, but to sell you his land, or, if he is foolish and refuses to sell, to wake up some morning and find that a grave had grown there in the night. For bury your dead there you must. You have no option. To bury him elsewhere would mean a life of haunting ill-fortune. But judging by the usual lie of graves the witch-dancer does not frequently indulge in such freaks of spite.
Later I was to travel with Yu See Kuk to the old capital of Kyung Ju. I found it a land of graves. They grew, not in mounds, but in hills, altering the configuration of the country. The dwindled city lay in a welter of stones, but the tombs remained. From the tops of them one looked down as though from a tower on to the miserable hovels of the living. Diminutive figures moved there at their ephemeral tasks ; but the dead overpeered them, overawed them.
Yet the Japanese are altering all that. The tombs are being opened. Their treasures stand classified and labelled on the shelves of museums. But do the dead take no revenge ?
You will still find a man, when fortune is
roMT.:
GRAVES AND FUNERALS
as
against him, taking counsel with the witch- dancer, and shifting his father’s grave to a more propitious site ; for if misfortune docs not grow from the anger of the dead it has no meaning. And for the same reason a funeral is a costly matter. Every honour must be paid to appease the departed, though the living go into debt for it, a debt piled up from generation to generation, of which those vast tombs might be a symbol.
Qjiite apart from superstition, from cramping custom and paralysing fear, speaking in mere terms of money the dead hold the living in a strangle grip.
Possibly this is the secret of Korea.
When I returned home that evening I was greeted effusively by Dr. Poole. He had been out with his camera too, a blatant and con- spicuous affair — though probably most efficient — which you held up to your eyes to bring it the more effectively to bear upon your object. He had had a most successful time. He had “ gotten pictures of most everything ” : the store-keepers, the sweet-vendors, the loaded oxen, the loaded men, the washing women.
He had been “ almighty fortunate.” He had seen a funeral, “ quite a swell parade.”
24 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
He showed me the photographs a few days later. There were several of the funeral, but one in particular, showing the palanquin at a tilt, a block of shadow against a dead white sky, the foreground blurred by the top of an unfocused flower-pot hat. It was entirely without atmo- sphere, crude in its heavy contrast of tones. It revealed nothing.
Yet I became quite friendly with Dr. Poole, in an amiable, superficial way. He had many excellent human qualities. He told me that it had distressed him when he first went to China to find that the young men held aloof fi*om base- ball. They considered such exercise only fit for coolies. But he was persuading them.
Precisely why do people like Dr. Poole come East ?
AS SKKN FROM THK tlRAV F TOI"
THE EMPEROR’S PORTRAIT
IT arrived in a car guarded by policemen. We were drawn up two deep to either side of the school drive, professors and students, reaching from the gateway to the porch. It was a cold day, but the occasion being august, coats and hats were not permitted. We were like soldiers on parade standing at ease on wait for the colonel. The drill major, resplendent in tight blue uniform gaudy with scarlet and gold, kept watch down the road for the coming of the car. His long sword flapping against his short bandy leg seemed to irritate him like an im- portunate dog. The Director (or as we should say, the Principal or the Head) stood stifl3y by the gate, uneasily clad in evening dress in violent disregard of the hour. He was a diminutive figure, and he carried his apparel in the manner of a tailor’s dummy, with legs a little apart and arms hanging out from the body. The illusion would have been complete if he had not from time to time put up a nervous
26 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
white-gloved hand to finger at his bow, which fell limply forward well below his collar stud, and threatened momently to slip apart in despairing exhaustion. Also he wore a white flower in his buttonhole, his cufls protruded magnificently, and his trousers fell well over his shoes.
The announcement that the portrait was to arrive that morning revealed to me suddenly a curious misconception into which 1 had fallen. During the school year there were many occasions when we gathered to celebrate divine events. For instance, the birthday of the reigning Emperor, the birthday of the Emperor Meiji who had created modern Japan, the birthday of the Emperor Jimmu Tenno (I was always terrified lest I should inadvertently refer to him by the disrespectful diminutive of Jimmy) who came down from heaven seven hundred years before Christ and founded the Japanese imperial line unbroken to this day. Also there was New Year, and odds and ends of festivals like that. The celebrations always took exactly the same form. We gathered in the school hall, sang the national anthem, bowed to the Emperor’s portrait, listened to a harangue by the Director, and retired — the staff at least — to a room apart to eat oranges and seaweed and rice and cuttle-
THE EMPEROR’S PORTRAIT 27
fish and drink saki. At least, 1 thought we used to bow to the Emperor’s portrait, because I knew that was what we were meant to do. We certainly bowed, and before doing so were turned, at a command from the drill major, half left, which brought us facing the door of a corner cupboard in the hall. It seems to me still quite natural that I should assume that the cupboard contained the portrait, not knowing that the portrait had not yet arrived, and having heard so many stories of its reverend and inviolable nature. Certainly it had seemed a trifle odd to bow to the door of a closed cupboard which guarded an image too divine to gaze upon, but no odder than other things one was called upon to do in Korea and Japan. But the coming of the portrait shattered that amusing misconcep- tion. We had bowed, not to a cupboard, but to Kyoto.
I have an idea that you are laughing at me. But let me explain that the portrait, of which every school possesses a copy, is held in such respect that there have been many mortalities among teachers who have rushed into blazing buildings to rescue it fi'om the flames. And if you wish to ruin a Director’s career — he may be your personal enemy, or you may covet his position-— you have merely to damage the
a8 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
Emperor’s portrait, and his occupation is gone. If he is high-minded and of the ancient breed he will write letters to his friends explaining his conduct and cut his stomach open with a sharp knife in an exact and prescribed faishion. If he is low-minded and of the modem breed he will simply resign.
While speaking of those ceremonies let me enlarge upon them a little more fully. The school hall was a well-proportioned and ample chamber which held the three hundred and fifty students commodiously, with the staff, perhaps forty of us, seated down the sides. At one end was a platform, set with a table in front and a table behind. In the back wall was a large, shallow alcove, shuttered, and screened behind the shutters with drawing curtains. It was here that the portrait, after its arrival, was installed, between two scrolls each inscribed with a single character, brushed on with magnificent, bold strokes. You might translate them tamely as Loyalty and Piety. Piety of Virgilian significance. Indeed, to understand the terms fully would be to understand the whole ethic of Japan. Loyalty to the Emperor, blind, ardent and unswerving, through life, into death, beyond death. Piety — that is, reverence for one’s parents, for one’s ancestors, equally blind, ardent and
THE EMPEROR’S PORTRAIT 29
unswerving, rooting the nation in an unshakable antiquity, vitalizing it with a single purpose. That at least is the theory.
Beside the platform was the cupboard of the amusing misconception. Yet it had its use.
We dressed for these occasions, the students in their customary uniforms, the teachers in morning coats, in frock coats, in evening dress, the last being the consummation of etiquette. But the tiny Japanese home affords little space for the storing of such apparel. The teachers would appear in creased garments, smelling of moth- balls, as though dragged hastily from a school acting-cupboard. For the most part they pre- ferred flimsy materials, shiny black cottons, so that their long-tailed coats himg about them like artists’ aprons. I used to laugh at their un- conscious incongruity when describing it to my friends, but really I was less sensitive to its humour than its pathc^. It would have been so much more seemly if they had dressed in their native robes. They knew how to wear them. Skirted, with wide sleeves, their necks free, they would have been in harmony with the spirit of the celebrations, with their rather fierce, intensely purposeful, devotion of the TamaUi Damaskiiy the Soul of Old Japan. As it was, one wondered just how much of all this
30 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
they sincerely believed. What did those cha- racters of stupendous import really convey to them ? Was their singing an immeaning repeti- tion, their bowing a formal pose ?
The ritual never varied. As the Director entered the hall the resplendent drill major called us sharply to our feet, “ Kirits / ” * called us sharply to bow, “ R6! ” We bowed in unison, the Director returning the salute with a lesser inclination. Then he faced the still-veiled portrait, not yet ascending to the platform. The ciutains opened. We were in the Presence. We bowed in a hushed awe.
When the portrait was again veiled the drill major called, “ One, two, three ! ” and the whole assembly broke into the national anthem. But there was no one to give the note. At first there was a deafening and indistinguishable roar, without melody, without key. A teacher to the right sang in a high tenor, a teacher to the left sang in a deep bass. But gradually the more powerful voices drew the singing into unison as though by a kind of vocal magnetism. The anthem ended in some sort of concord.
As for me, I could not join in the strange words.
1 watched the Korean students to see how they
* So the command always sounded to me, though in full it should be, "tCi o tsuki** ("Apply your minds").
THE EMPEROR’S PORTRAIT 31
responded to this alien patriotism. To all appearance they sang with much the same abandon as the Japanese, though perhaps not with the same ecstatic closing of the eyes, throw back of the head, straining of the throat. And certainly here and there a face or two showed glum, remembering, possibly, the days when Korea possessed an Emperor of her own. Yet if so, they could have hardly wished him back. He was an entirely ineffective old man, ruled by a Chinese wife, whom the Japanese removed in their own particular method when she obstructed their policy. The Emperor, lost without her, fled one morning in a woman’s chair to the Russian Embassy. Quite an effete Oriental monarch who appeared occasionally among his people, borne on a palanquin through streets carefully cleared and cleaned for him, and lined with soldiers. He would have yielded to the persuasions of the missionaries, fiiends of his, and become a Christian, promising to issue an edict commanding the whole country to imitate his conversion; but Christianity and concubines appeared to be irreconcilable, and the concubines won the day. His will was law, he flourished on extortion, he lived in momently fear of assassina* tion, he knew nothing of his people ; his place was in a museum, not on a throne. Surely the
32 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
Koreans had lost nothing in their forced sub- mission to the strenuous Japanese cult. Yet the cult was Japanese.
The singing over, the Director ascended the platform, slowly, both feet halting on each step. From the table at the back he took a flat, black- lacquered box, bowed over it, bore it reverently, and placed it before him on the front table, bowed over it, loosened the securing ribbons, and removed the lid, bowed over it, folded back the comers of a silk wrapper and drew out a docu- ment, bowed over it, and holding it up before him commenced to read. It was the edict to the schools issued by the Emperor Meiji, exhorting to laboiur and obedience. Read in a sing-song of emphatic nasalities it sounded quite impressive. The reading completed, it was returned to its place with reversed ceremonial. Then followed the Director’s harangue.
I could not understand a word. But the little fellow, ctistomarily rather self-effacing and extremely polite, took on an amazing animation. The students watched him with undiverted eyes, with never a smile, expressionlessly intent. But they must have known exactly what he intended to say before he opened his lips. It was im- possible that he should have deviated from his official creed of Loyalty and Piety. By virtue
THE EMPEROR’S PORTRAIT
33
of his place that was his only text, his only sermon.
But I am doomed to a discordant memory which robs these ceremonies of their solemnity. On one occasion when we had bowed to the portrait and were waiting for the curtains to close over it, we found ourselves arrested with bent backs because the curtains remained obsti- nately apart. It was impossible to straighten ourselves while the Presence was in view. The Director, inclined in front of us, coughed discreetly, coughed with authority. The curtains remained apart. Then at last I discovered the purpose of that cupboard. The teacher nearest to it approached it, with hands on thighs and back bent almost at right angles, an attitude which gave him the appearance of minutely scrutinizing the floor. He opened the door and held a whispered consultation with some one concealed within. Of course a school servant whose duty it was at the appointed moment to pull the cord. The teacher returned, in the same attitude of scrutiny. We continued bowed, glancing up at the curtains from under lowered brows. Still they did not move. A hitch in the mechanism of a piece of string threatened to hold us in that hall all day in postures of profound humility, awed by a portrait. The teacher
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34 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
approached the cupboard a second time. Then suddenly with a leap the curtains fell together. The portrait veiled was no longer a thing of power. We straightened in relief.
I cannot get that out of my mind ; nor the later adventures of that picture. For reasons which I have already explained, it would have been unwise to leave it in its alcove, a prey to spiteful enemies and fire. A granite safe was built for it — as was customary at all the schools — set to one side of the drive and planted about with trees ; for all the world like a latrine. But before the safe was built the picture was kept for sectuity in the porter’s lodge. It was hung on a wall opposite a window which overlooked the road. But this was inconvenient, because all passers-by were obliged to stop and bow. It was changed to another wall. But this time it was visible from the tennis courts, which occasioned incongruous reverences when a player’s eyes chanced that way. There was nowhere else to hang it, the lodge appearing to consist of two walls and two windows. Saal What to do about it ?
It was turned face to the wall.
As it arrived that day a cohort of waiting policemen surroimded the car, while others kept
THE EMPEROR’S PORTRAIT 35
at bay suspicious prowlers. The resplendent drill major called “ Kirits ! ” and we sprang to attention, called “ ” and we bowed.
It was carried up the drive between us, bowed so in a double row. A policeman preceded it, followed by the Director — ^in evening dress — who bore it before him, veiled, holding it at the full stretch of his arms with his head bent over it, himself followed by a further train of pohcemen. The procession moved with a slow deliberation, as though in fear lest the portrait should be shaken in its frame, causing sympathetic dis- quietudes to the Son of Heaven in his palace at Kyoto. And not till the school door closed safely behind it did the drill major call us back to rectitude.
We saw it later : a couple of half-crown photographs, I should say, the Emperor in marshal’s uniform, the Empress in a Western robe and crown, framed together in a white wood frame.
Yet there was a fineness in its cheap simplicity. One would not inquire its price in dollars. And if it represented what it pretended to represent it was beyond price, a force incalculable.
We ate cuttlefish and drank sake in its honour. The cuttlefish was cut into hard, hairy strings.
36 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
It tasted faintly of salt as one chewed it, and was more endurable than gum. The sak§ we drank warm from minute bowls. Those who drank plentifully became merry. It is the Japanese national wine, of no particular virtue.
But please don’t call it “ sacky.”
IV
INNS
IT was Yu See Kuk who introduced me to my first Korean inn. I accompanied him with a certain misgiving, for I had read much and heard more ; details of night life, you understand, which made one shudder. I believe I was threatened, too, with typhoid and cholera if I attempted to live on Korean food. The warn- ing was well meant, though a trifle exaggerated. And in any case I was already committed.
The fact was that I wished to visit Kyung Ju (in Japanese pronunciation Keishu), an old capital of an earlier dynasty where one might see the best of Korean art. It seemed better to travel with a native student who understood the place than with a foreign missionary who pretended to. Incidentally I lived in an atmo- sphere of foreign missionary, and it was pleasant for a little to escape it. But travelling with a native I was obliged to limit myself to his means. A Japanese inn would have been beyond his purse, quite apart from his rooted detestation of
37
38 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
all things Japanese. A Korean inn was the only alternative.
But I’m writing as though I consented to the alternative purely because it was unavoidable. This was not so at all. I was extremely anxious to sample the native hostelry. Secretly I was hoping for a full portion of the reported horrors. And the amazing state of dirt of the ordinary Korean house, and the daily vision of squatting figures by doorways and gutters and street corners rolling back their clothing in a leisurely pursuit of lice, seemed to promise that I should not be disappointed. I imagined myself return- ing, stripping in the garden and making a bonfire of my clothing, and from there heading straight for the bath. Still, I wasn’t exactly hankering for typhoid or cholera.
From the capital we took the night train south to Taiku. It was part of the financial condition that we should travel third class. You under- stand that it would have been impossible for me to offer to defray a single sen of my companion’s expenses. Eastern pride could not have endured the affront, and I should have made an enemy for ever. I was prepared to sit up all night on a wooden bench in an atmosphere of smoke and garlic ; but no such thing. There were bunks arranged in a triple tier, upholstered, though
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thinly, with a hard pillow, but no bedding. It was the end of March, and the weather was still wintry, but the compartment was so well heated that if one did not undress one needed no bedding. In fact, the bunk was more comfort- able than in a first- or second-class carriage where one lay on a soft mattress, beneath a pile of blankets, behind curtains, unable to sleep for stuffiness and heat. Here the air blew refreshingly down the length of the coach. It was no sort of preliminary to my anticipated discomforts. In fact, I was deciding that in future I should always travel this way. But the discomforts might await me yet.
We disembarked at Taiku at six in the morning. For two hours we must wait at the station before we could travel by the local motor service (Ford car) to Kyung Ju. But the Japanese provide warm waiting-rooms. We spent the time fitfully continuing our broken sleep, and in breakfast. Not quite knowing what lay ahead of me, I ordered “ baconeggs ” in the manner of a man feasting well before plunging into the wilds.
I think there were nine of us in that Ford car ; but the intimate contact of bodies kept us warm, which was comforting with the sharp air of the morning cutting like a knife through the gaps of the flapping wind-screens. The ride lasted
40 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
two hours along an excellent road — by which one means merely that it was hard — ^built straight and high like a causeway above the muddy rice-fields, dipping suddenly to fords where it crossed the stony beds of streams. But at the end of the journey I found myself stiff and numb, and much colder than I had thought. Indeed, I wzis violently shivering. And the destination was cheerless. Kyung Ju, judging by its main street, seemed little more than a village. Between its lines of tiled-roofed, single- storied houses, with no sign of the West there, with hardly a sign of Japan, I felt something of the same sense of desolation as one felt in the war when taking up new billets in some lost and broken Flemish hamlet. While my companion made inquiries I stood idly by receiving no impressions except one of vague abandonment, and when, after an infinite discussion, which slowly sucked into it half the male inhabitants of the street, he seemed to have come to some conclusion I followed him tamely without a word.
We turned into a side street where a single cart could hardly have passed between the open sewers by the blank, mud walls. But at the end the street widened a little, and here we came upon our inn.
The enclosing walls, roofed with tiles, were
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indeed of stone, but the entrance promised little cheer. A double gateway, inscribed down the sides with Chinese characters, opened between two tiny, papered windows like unseeing eyes. But once within the courtyard the place looked more prosperous, more hospitable. It was built four-square, with a block of guest-chambers to either side, and opposite us the host’s rooms and the kitchen. A girl was drawing water from a well. A woman was crouched beside the kitchen fire stirring messes in round, flat, iron pans. At the sight of us entering they ceased their drawing and their stirring like mechanical figures whose clockwork had run out. They became two pairs of eyes expressionlessly at gaze. My companion took no notice of them. He advanced to the centre of the courtyard and, clapping his hands, called a summons, with a certain imperiousness of tone warrantable in a University student accompanied by a white man. And a University professor at that. From a low doorway opposite the host appeared with the startled suddenness of a rabbit smoked out of a hole. He was obliged to stoop to pass beneath the lintel. He stepped into a pair of canoe-shaped rubber shoes, which lay ready on the raised platform outside the door, came down fi’om the platform, and advancing to within a few yards of
42 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
us bowed, and muttered expressions of polite welcome.
It was some little while before we were duly installed. Of course we must have the best room. We passed into a second courtyard, something more sumptuous, bounded on three sides -by guest-chambers, and on the fourth by the street wall. Having examined all the rooms and selected one, which was accordingly swept for us, set with cushions, cigarettes and ash-trays, and having removed our boots and settled our- selves cross-legged on the cushions, my companion chose to find some defect. Again clapping his hands, he called for the host, who had left us to see to fire and food, and announced that the room was not suitable. A fresh room was chosen, exactly similar, as far as I could see, to the one we had left, was swept for us, set with cushions, cigarettes and ash-trays, and we settled ourselves as before. But in a few minutes my companion was up again, passing backwards and forwards from the old room to the new. He thought, perhaps, the old room was the better. But I had no intention of moving a second time.
I said that I greatly preferred the room we were in, it was much more convenient than the other, to which he smiled in instant agreement. I thought the occasion called for a pipe.
THE INN ( OURTYARI)
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The room was about nine feet square, one of three in a block facing the street wall. The three rooms opened into each other by sliding screens, and on to a covered platform outside by papered doors of fretted woodwork. Such light as there was filtered through the opaque cream paper of the door, shut now against the cold. There was no furniture except a four-inch-high table and a mirror in a swinging frame which stood on the floor. The floor was laid with thick, oiled paper securely glued down. Beneath, I knew, were granite slabs, the interstices well plastered, arranged over long flues ; for the Koreans heat their houses in Roman fashion with fires from beneath. On the floor were set the thin cushions on which we squatted. It felt cold to our stockinged feet, but gradually it grew warmer, became hot, so that we were obliged to tuck our feet on to the cushions, as the fire which our host had lit for us made its presence felt. The air, too, lost its penetrating chill. We opened the door.
There was nothing to look at except the empty courtyard bounded by the blank wall, and to either side the flaiJdng blocks, exact counter- parts of our own, with their three little doors in a row and covered platforms.
Food was brought to us. Presumably a second
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breakfast. It was set on separate tables in dishes and bowls of brass, with brass chop>-sticks and a flat brass spoon. A boy was in attendance to serve us with rice, and our host settled himself in a comer, squatting on his heels in the manner of the Koreans, and, asking permission, drew out a slender bamboo pipe and enjoyed a three-whiff smoke. He was a solemn-faced, thin man, with drooping lips, high cheek-bones, and a straggling goatee beard whose every hair showed distincdy detached as though separately inserted by some artificial process. He maintained a continual flow of conversation, occasionally tapping out his pipe and refilling it with a minute ball of fine hair-like tobacco. But, though his manner suggested that he had come to entertain his guests while they dined, his eyes upon me made one suspect that it was curiosity that had drawn him to observe the foreigner. But he was too polite to betray any amusement at my clumsiness. Indeed, he was very polite. I learned later that he was of the Korean yangban (noble) class, abolished by the Japanese, and was now inn-keeping for a living.
I bent to my table. There was a thin soup, pungent with red pepper ; there were squares of bean curd ; there were poached eggs ; there were innumerable nameless dishes seasoned with
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garlic and onion ; there were little pancakes, and what seemed to me to be celery fried in batter ; there were miniscular fishes which one ate a dozen to the mouthful, highly savoury, and spotted as they lay contorted together with starting black shrimp’s eyes ; and there was kimchi, the native pickle, whose reek of sour vinegar pervades the whole atmosphere of Korea ; and there was rice. Plentiful rice, hot, white and dry, with every grain distinct. And if one wished to drink there was a shallow brass bowl of brownish fluid, the water in which the rice had been boiled.
I fed well. I found the fare appetizing, though it was beyond me to eat more than a quarter of what was provided. I began to wonder at the stories I had heard of the inedibility of Korean food. But I understood the stories better when supper was an exact repetition of breakfast, and the breakfasts and suppers that followed exact repetitions of the breakfasts and suppers that went before, with lunch between merely a rehashing of what remained. I found myself sickening with the fat, with the peculiar savours, and hankered for plum cake and fruit. I could have drunk quarts of tea ; I could have eaten tins of biscuits. I had taken certain provisions with me, but half-heartedly, in a reluctant
46 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
yielding to insistent advice. But among my provisions there was nothing that tempted me, except a tin of Kraft cheese. One day I opened this, and found it delicious. I offered a piece to Yu See Kuk. He nibbled a tiny end, and promptly swallowed a bowlful of rice, for all his Eastern politeness unable to repress violent symptoms of sickness. Yet he would gorge on that dreadful kimchi.
We spent the day among the temples and the tombs.
It was little comfort to return in the evening weary-limbed to find nothing more commodious to rest on than a thin cushion on a hard floor. And the floor was barely warm, as the fire had burnt out.
To my amazement I learnt there was a bath. A Japanese affair, I found it, installed in an outhouse. It consisted of a deep iron cauldron, the water heated by a fire firom beneath. We washed before entering, in approved fashion. Chilling draughts blew in upon us from the ill- fitting doors and windows, and in contrast the water we poured over us was stinging hot. Yu See Kuk ventured first into the cauldron, and sprang out with a yell, holding to a scorched foot. He was evidently unaccustomed to Japanese baths. I was able to teach him something of the
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East. The bath possessed a wooden lid. One stood on this, forcing it to sink, till it wedged itself against the side some inches from the bottom, which, with the fire under it, was hot enough to take the skin from one’s feet.
After supper the bedding was brought in and laid upon the floor. So far the place had appeared to me scrupulously clean. There was no opportunity for dirt to gather on the smooth, oiled floor. I thought the promised horrors might be concealed in the bedding. But the bedding was a miracle of spotlessness : a couple of silken quilts, white for the mattress, crimson for the coverlet, but tacked across the top with a white band. It was a shame to wear any night gear. If I had been alone I should have rolled myself between them naked. And now, with the fire replenished, the floor was hot again, a genial warmth penetrating from beneath lapped one from head to foot in an instantaneous beatitude. It would be difficult to rise in the morning.
But we did rise, and washed outside on the platform in basins of hot water which left the skin shiveringly sensitive to the freezing air. And in the comer of the courtyard was a latrine. That at least was orthodox Korean. Yu See Kuk cautioned me against it, beseechingly, as
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though suggesting that for a few days I might abstain. If the rest of the inn had been in keeping with that latrine the dark prophesyings of my well-wishers would have been abundantly fulfilled, perhaps even to typhoid and cholera.
Our entertainment cost us two yen (four ^ shillings) a day.
Yet there are such inns as my friends described to me. There was one across the road. We watched a play there, given by a company of strolling players, exactly in the manner of our own early drama. A peep into the tiny rooms — ^like rows of animals’ cages — revealed to me all that I had escaped.
But here is the most unique description of a Korean inn that has ever been written, because, except negatively, it makes no mention of insect-powders and horrible creeping things.
And it is all quite true.
THE TEMPLE OF PEL KUK SA, NEAR KYUNG JU
V
KWAN-OK-SAN
SHE was a spinster, and her name was Turniptops. Or rather, to judge by her emphasis of the last syllable, it was probably hyphened : Turnip-Tops. Yet she was not ashamed to be making the round of the globe, inscribing that name in hotel registers, proclaiming it to strangers. Of course it was possible that she was seeking to alter it. I rather think the search will be in vain.
She arrived one evening at my hostess’s house. She had already seen Japan and was on her way to China, allowing herself a single day to “ do ” Korea. She was not unique in this. It seems to have become an established custom among tourists of the Far East, a convention you might call it, to do Korea in a single day. Though once a party of Christian Young Men, who also boarded with my hostess, remained two days. But they were immature and irresponsible and with an undeveloped sense of the proportions of things. And once I met a lady who spent a
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fortnight in the country. But her soul must have been rare and star-like. And I believe she was granted a vision ; which would be upsetting to the tourist, whose ambition appears to be to tick off names in guide-books with the maximum speed.
Miss Turniptops (or Tumip-Tops) had a pink face and a hooked nose. The outer edges of her eyelids slanted down over her eyes, like curtains looped back to either side of a double window. She was dressed in a frock of bunchy and transparent muslin patterned with large, faint flowers. She sat upright on the sofa and kept us out of bed till nearly midnight (my hosts usually retired at nine), telling us all that she had seen in Japan.
One or two of us had already been to Japan.
Also it was clear that she had not deviated an inch from the prescribed routes.
She was intending to spend the next day in the city, and leave by the night train.
“ Only one day ? ” I asked.
But my satire was lost on her. Yes, only one day, though she would have just loved, etc., etc. And she drew out a copy of the Chosen Hotel guide-book, and read to us a list of the places she meant to visit : the Government House, the North Palace, the East Palace, Independence
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Arch, Pagoda Park. Read out like that the list sounded rather imposing ; but having seen these things one was not impressed.
“ While at the East Palace,” I suggested to her, “ you had better see the zoo.”
She was instant attention, and rummaging in her hand-bag for a pencil sat with it poised, preparing to take notes.
“ I suppose there are many rare specimens ? ” she asked eagerly.
“ It’s quite unique,” I told her. “ There’s a monkey-house ; and there are two elephants in a cage. You feed the monkeys with pea-nuts and the elephants with buns. It’s awfully jolly.”
I think from that moment she began to take a dislike to me.
Yet I did my best for her. I asked her to join a party, of which I was one, and come with us the next day (Sunday) to climb the Kwan-ok- san. I told her that the city would disappoint her, that the beauty of Korea was in its hills.
Of course she still thought I was teasing her. To spend her single day in the hills ! Besides, travelling up from the coast she had seen the hills. She had seen them from the train. As a sop to my possibly genuine good intentions she said that the hills were “just lovely.” And that set her talking for another hour, while my host’s
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head nodded and my hostess rocked herself violently in her chair, telling us all that she had seen of Korea from the window of her train.
We had also travelled in trains with windows.
The next morning — ^it was Sunday, you remember — my hostess thought it politic to inform Miss Turniptops (or Turnip-Tops) that I wrote books. This was to account for my unsabbatical costume. I was in shorts, tieless, my shirt collar folding over the collar of my tunic. Presumably this sort of thing was permissible in one who wrote books.
I wished Miss Turniptops a successful day, and shouldering my camera and rucksack set off for the station.
For a long time I had wanted to climb Kwan- ok-san. From the hills behind my house, ever since my first coming to Korea, I had looked across to it almost daily. It lay to the east across the river, a long serrated ridge rising to a fantastic central summit for all the world like a cock’s comb. It bounded the view to that direction, a superb background to a wide sweep of ragged ranges. In shape it might have been some horny-backed monster of the primal swamps ; in colour it glowed to the western sky a deep amber crested with violet. But this might be said of a thousand Korean mountains. Yet
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53
there was something peculiar in Kwan-ok-san. It came to me of a sudden one day that its peculiarity lay not in its strangeness but in its exact truth to type. Other hills had a quietude, a wildness, a suavity or a vigour, particular to themselves alone ; but Kwan-ok-san had that universal quality which arrests one occasionally in the poise of a tree, in the curve of a river, in a stormy sky, in a serene sunset, when one feels that if all other trees and rivers, all other storms and sunsets, were forgotten it would be sufficient to remember these. And it is so with me still. Kwan-ok-san remains in my mind as the perfec- tion, the ideal. To conjure up the vision of this single mountain is to conjure up the whole of Korea.
Perhaps the essential appeal of the Korean mountains is that they cry to you to climb them. There is a strenuous challenge in them that will not let you rest. They are no mere pictorial settings for the valleys. They are pinnacles of outlook, and you are not satisfied till you have scaled each one to the topmost peak. That is, you are never satisfied, for the hills are legion ; a healthy spiritual state. The Koreans them- selves are victims to this spell. Lazy and lethargic, slow-stepping and with eyes brimmed with sleep, even they cannot resist the call of
54 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
their mountains. The older men will picnic on the summits, squatting on their heels to drink wine and smoke long pipes, and amusing them- selves with dancing-girls and flute-players ; the younger men will leap among the rocks like goats, and plant themselves on dizzy crests and sing — also like goats. And Kwan-ok-san called like other mountains to which I had already yielded ; but more imperatively. It was good to know that the day for climbing it had come at last.
I met my fiiends at the station : several Germans, an American, an English girl, two Eurasian girls, some others. Not entirely respectable, perhaps. The Germans, for instance, had not yet been readmitted to the Club since their exclusion during the War. Many people still would not speak to them. The Eurasian girls, courted as dancing partners, were otherwise eyed askance. Yet I was at one with them all. Sunday by Sunday we made raids together into the hills. Ephemeral feuds, and the antipathies of blood and colour, were powerless against the everlasting rocks and the universal air.
A short train journey took us over the river to where the approach began.
We passed among rice-paddies, making towards the hills. Men in white, splashed to the shoulders, with pantaloons rolled up to the
KWAN-OK-SAN
55
kneeS) and scarves about their heads, were ploughing in the last year’s stubble. In the slow inconsequence of their movements they seemed as purely animal as the apathetic oxen that drew the ploughs, wading laboriously through the black ooze of the mud. Others were digging clear the irrigation ditches, three or five working to a single shovel, one holding the handle, the others heaving from in front at ropes attached to the blade. They worked without zeal, without speed, piling the mud up on the banks. Jigi-mtn passed us bearing enormous loads on their backs of fish and vegetables. By wayside runnels women squatted at their washing, everlastingly beating at the soiled white cottons with wooden clubs. A world of toil, of un- questioning patience, of unconscious content.
We reached the lower slopes. A narrow earth track, curving upwards, shelving by rounded bluffs of loose granite sand, and twisting between gaps and saddles, brought us to a temple. It was built on a platform of rock on the top of an immense boulder which thrust up out of the earth. Twisted pines clung to the crevices with a network of naked roots. We rested beneath the rock where a spring bubbled. A hollow for the water had been hewn in the granite and a channel cut for it to flow free. A long-handled
56 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
dipper lay by the hollow. The water was crystal-clear and ice-cold, infinitely refreshing. Because already the morning was hot. It was early summer. The sky was of a deep blue unflecked by cloud, the sun growing powerful. A faint haze still lay about the horizon, but this was thinning. It was real Korean weather, beneficent and serene.
Suddenly from the temple above us drums boomed, and droning voices began lingeringly to intone an invocation to Buddha :
“ Naaxi-mooo Aaa-meeda Booool ! Naaa-mooo Aaa- meeda Booool ! ”
That would endure for hours.
Climbing up to the temple platform we could see the chanting priests in the shadow of the hall, cross-legged upon the paper-laid floor, their drums before them, their faces drawn in pained abstraction, oblivious as children of the surround- ing world. And opposite the open door Buddha squatted behind the altar, backed by a medley of painted saints, gazing through a haze of incense smoke flushed with candle-light, but with eyes entirely expressionless and incapable of vision. There seemed no single correlation between this somnolent worship and the vigorous hills around.
Leaving the temple the slopes became steeper, the path dwindled out. We pushed among
KWAN-OK-SAN
57
shrubby pine, planted by the Japanese, and from a crest took bearings for Kwan-ok-san looming up from the valley below. The cock’s-comb summit showed now in its true aspect of stark rocks. Deep gorges cut down from it to the valley, green against the purple granite and the yellow disintegrated sand. We singled out the gorge which promised the readiest ascent, and plunged for the valley through a world grown suddenly wild. We lowered ourselves by rocks and trees, clinging to roots, pushing through entangling clumps of acacia. Striking a gully, where water trickled and disappeared and oozed out again between shrubs and boulders, we followed it recklessly to find ourselves shut in to either side with rocky walls which hid from us our goal. There were only three of us now. Our party had become divided. We halloed to each other from time to time so as to keep in touch. The trickling water became a slender torrent. We could not cross it and recross at pleasure. Choosing the bank which kept us nearer to our friends we held to it, and after an hour of hopping and leaping reached the valley below.
But the rest of our party, descending by another gully, had aimed better than we, coming out at the mouth of the gorge which led up the mountain. To rejoin them we could have made
58 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
quite easily up the valley, but we preferred to cut at a slant over the lower slopes of the mountain. It was a foolish thing to do. We found ourselves ankle-deep in loose sand on bluffs so steep that we could scarcely maintain our balance. We found ourselves in wildernesses of rocks and pines. We were obliged to scale ridges and drop into gullies, fatiguing ourselves unnecessarily with an unceasing up-and-down progress. And the sun was hot, and the air was dry. But we came upon runnels where we could drink. And it was splendidly exhilarating.
We struck the gorge at length. There were still two hours before us of upward struggle. We found our friends at the top seated at ease among the stark boulders. They welcomed us with an ironic superiority, mockingly incredulous at our assertions that if the mountain were to be climbed again we would choose the same route.
We lunched, smoked, lazed ; some of us slept.
There was still a higher peak to cUmb where a temple was built on the edge of a precipice. We made up to it by a track worn on the rock by the rubbing of many feet. It led along the top of a bare ridge, and dropped by a natural stair- way in a cleft between boulders to a narrow platform, so narrow indeed that one hesitated to descend. But one descended. And rounding
KWAN-OK-SAN
59
a hump of rock came to the temple. It was a tiny building, red-pillared, backed against the cliff, and with a platform before it, perhaps a couple of yards wide, overlooking a sheer abyss.
But from here one had the pageant of the mountains full in view. Range beyond range of fantastic crests, wildly indented, seeming to curl over like waves, as though the whole land had been suddenly petrified in the midst of a molten agitation. Here, in spite of the temple behind, if one had worshipped it would not have been the impassive Buddha, but the Spirit of the Ancient Earth, cruel and adorable, of which Man is the creature.
We returned by another route. Men and boys scraped among the pines for fuel, twigs and leaves and needles. They used long, fan-shaped rakes, and gathering their fuel into bimdles they bound them about with straw ropes, and piling them on to wooden frames set their backs to them, crouching low and steadying themselves laboriously to their feet by the aid of stout staves. And reaching the valleys we came again to the ploughing men and the washing women. Earth, earth, and earth ! With our eyes full of the hills this people took on a new significance. They might have risen from the
6o KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
soil, the harvest of some ancient dragon’s teeth ; a dragon not of the rocks, but some wallowing monster of the mud. Yet the mountains were all about them, and at times they seemed to imderstand the mountains. At times. And perhaps only a few. For these were not the breed who leapt among rocks, and amused themselves with dancing-girls and flute-players. Those were the young, or the fortunate and liberated souls not constrained to grub ever- lastingly in the soil for a pitiable living.
The earth is not yet inherited of her children.
A last look at Kwan-ok-san, amber and violet with the sunset upon it, as the train carried us back across the river.
And this was how Miss Tumiptops (or Turnip- Tops) must have seen it, from the window of her train. I was in time to meet her again. She had half an hour to spare before starting for the station, before leaving Korea for ever, having spent a whole day, “ a perfectly lovely day,” in the capital. She was telling my hosts of all she had seen : the Government House, the North Palace, the East Palace.
“ Did you remember the zoo ? ” I asked.
Certainly the earth is not yet inherited of her children.
TllK VVASHINCi WOMEN
VI
THE UNTYPICAL ENGLISHMAN
ONE met very few Englishmen in Korea, and as those few failed to conform to type I can’t draw for you the customary caricature. There was one who would listen for three hours on end to gramophone records of classical music, and enjoyed it. There was another who spoke French with a perfect accent. Another was suspected of secret hankerings towards suicide. Another was a completely unmannered boor. You see my difficulty.
There was yet another whom I am singling out to describe.
Quite apart from his being thoroughly worth an introduction he throws a light on the motives which draw men abroad. Judging by the people one meets, out East at any rate, it is seldom romance which is the lure. The business man is hard, canny, brutal. Sometimes he is a gentle- man ; but even so his object is money, and his ambition an early and comfortable retirement — at home. The Government official pursues
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62 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
promotion with an undeviating disregard of locality. The doctor is less intrigued by interest- ing diseases than by his phenomenal pay. The missionary, victim of a superiority complex and a sublimated Wanderlust, approaches nearer to the romantic ; but he is unaware of it, and he is speedily cured. This man, however, came East neither through an itching palm nor itching feet. He wanted to be alone.
A teaching appointment gave him his oppor- tunity.
By the way, this is not myself that I am portraying in a subtly veiled parable. This man existed ; he exists. I shall have to apologize to him for exposing him in this way. Because his soul is somewhat owl-like, hating the light. And when I apologize he will look at me with a searching seriousness and say, “You don’t mean it.” Which, of course, will be true.
The mention of truth brings me at once to the secret of his loneliness. He found himself obliged by some sensitive compunction always to speak the truth. Which is unsociable. I have heard him, not once only, interrupt his wife in some amusing anecdote with a curt, “ That’s a lie.” At which the dear lady, imaginatively garrulous, with a rather damp face and untidy hair, would break into a voluble justification. Not of the
THE UNTYPICAL ENGLISHMAN 63
exactitude of her remark, but of the permissibility, indeed the necessity and the duty, of untruthful- ness in conversation. For conversation to her was an art, not a dull interchange of information. And I’m afraid, from the latter point of view, she was an unscrupulous liar of the first order. When I became more familiar with the couple I was able to tell her so, with the frank directness of her husband. But it never perturbed her in the least. “ Of course, if you only want dry facts ...” Yet for the man, with his Puritanic conception of truth complicated by his wife’s theory of conversation as an art, social inter- course was impossible. It was awkward to feel yourself obliged to tell people precisely what you thought of them, punctuating your remarks with abrupt announcements across the drawing-room that your wife was telling a lie. The only alternative was solitude.
Curiously enough people thought he was rude.
He fled East, thinking that there he could bury himself among strangers whose language he would not understand, and whom, consequently, he would not be compelled to shock by his unfortu- nate virtue. His wife accompanied him, plucky lady. They lived at first in a Japanese inn, later in a Japanese house, sitting on cushions on the mat-laid floor and eating rice and raw fish
64 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
and seaweed. I believe they both fell ill. I found them installed in a house of their own building, well outside the east gate of the city. One turned from the terminus of a single-line tram route by a path that crossed among rice- paddies and a brick-kiln and a village, up a slope between humped graves, and came upon it set high on a knoll. I was obliged to remove my boots in a little Japanese vestibule before entering by papered screens. But inside, on the ground floor at lezist, the house was furnished in Western fashion, though upstairs the rooms were set with yellow Japanese mats. Also the sitting-room had Western windows on one side and Japanese windows on the other, opening on to a Japanese veranda. It was warmed in winter by an immense iron stove, which stood central in the room, with a zinc pipe passing under the ceiling and through a wall. There was a couch and chairs, a small table, a carpet on a polished board floor, and a grand piano. The pictures were mostly Eastern, both Japanese and Korean. Old Korean vases stood here and there, crude and handsome ; and there were two Korean chests. The lady took me the round of the vases and the pictures, expatiating on their age, their significance. I discovered that she had absorbed an amazing amount of information during her
THE UNTYPICAL ENGLISHMAN 65
few years in the country, but later, when I knew her better, I wondered how much was fact and how much fable.
These people were vegetarians. The husband on principle, the wife, possibly on principle, possibly from necessity. I was served with continuous courses of apples and hard Japanese pears and bananas and slices of pineapple and bread and butter, provided at long intervals by a Korean woman, dressed in white, with clumsy fingers and a melancholy face.
I visited frequently. There must have been something peculiar about me, because I was sincerely welcomed ; a unique privilege, I soon discovered, when talking to other folk about the couple. People deplored their solitude, tried to break in upon it, making special journeys in a slow tram crowded with Koreans smelling of kimchi pickles, buzzing with flies, choking with dust, to be turned away at the door because no one was at home, or to be admitted after duly removing their shoes. The wife occasionally visited me ; but in visible agitation lest any of her well-wishers should come upon her in the streets and engage her for a tea-party. She was dreadfully timid of such invitations. Particularly she was terrified of a certain missionary lady who lived next door to me. She would make a long
F
66 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
detour through narrow twisting alleys between native hovels, up a steep hill, and down through the graveyard above the house I lived in, to avoid being seen by the missionary lady through her window which spied upon the main path. But there was a reason. The missioniuy lady, after a tea-party, had once persuaded her for the good of her soul to kneel down among the cake-stands and pray.
The man was a poet ; his wife was his single adorer. It was reported to me once — as an example of his madness or his rudeness or his unsociability, I’m not sure which — that once when he was asked why he didn’t join more in the life of the community he answered, “ I can’t see people and write poetry too.” It was his wife who gave me some of his poems to read — published in the London Mercury — while he sat severely by, squatting on a chair cross-legged like a Buddha hugging naked feet. To tell the truth I couldn’t understand the poems very well. It was an awkward moment, which I delayed as long as possible, when the time came to express an opinion. I was torn between those rival theories of truth. But it doesn’t matter very much what I said. At least I didn’t forfeit their friendship.
But he was really a poet, in his attitude to life,
THE UNTYPICAL ENGLISHMAN 67
even in his appearance. He had a face of astonishing beauty, hazel eyes, long, brown, curling hair. It was unfortunate that he didn’t shave more frequently, nor wash more scrupu- lously, nor take the trouble to brush away the accumulated scurf from the shoulders of his coat. It was difficult to penetrate beyond these things to the really startling beauty of his face. He worshipped Perfection. His wife played the piano, and had brought a grand with her from England ; but I could never persuade her to “ favour me with a tune ” because Reggie — ^from the beginning she referred to her husband by his Christian name — couldn’t endure to listen to music which wasn’t perfect. Instead they treated me to an occasional gramophone record, not permitting me to select what I preferred, but choosing something “ perfect ” which would be good for me to hear.
They slept on quilts on the floor.
The wife once asked me whether I went to church. She wasn’t trying to convert me. Rather she was hoping to find in me an ally in her own non-attendance. Because the mission- aries were continually laying siege to her ; , but she put them off by telling the Presbyterians that she was a Methodist, and the Methodists that she was a Seventh Day Adventist, and
68 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
the Seventh Day Adventists that she was an Episcopalian, always laying herself open to fresh assaults.
“ And what are you ? ” she suddenly asked me.
I hedged.
“ My parents are Baptists,” I told her.
She burst into a wail of unconsolable self- reproaches. How stupid she had been ! She hadn’t thought of Baptists. That would have ended the whole matter, because there were no Baptists in Korea.
Yet she might have ended the matter quite simply by telling the truth. She was a Jewess by birth. But presumably she had schooled herself so completely to falsehood that the truth never obtruded itself upon her even when it would have served her purpose.
The setting of the solitary house was romantic in the extreme. Beyond the surrounding rice- paddies the hills rose up abruptly to sharp, hard crests. Green gullies striped the steep slopes between bluffs of grey granite and humps of tawny sand. We strolled together along the tops of low ridges. My friend would say to me, “ There’s a Buddhist temple on that mountain,” or “ That hill is always blue.” And behind his precise information I felt a passion for beauty too
THE UNTYPICAL ENGLISHMAN 69
sensitive to express itself in common words. It was quite unnecessary that his wife should break in with an explanatory gush, “ Reggie loves that hill. I think he would die if you took away that hill.” I wanted to promise not to take it away, but frivolity sank rebuked before the fixed regard of those hazel eyes. I wondered whether I was in the presence of another Shelley.
Once I provoked a discussion on vegetarianism. I knew immediately that I had committed an unpardonable offence, like violating a hospitality, or desecrating a shrine. The discussion soon resolved itself into an impassioned defence of Reggie by his wife. She became really heated, I believe a little hysterical, while her husband sat by silent and austere. I gathered that he ate no meat because of his shrinking from taking life.
“ Reggie loves animals,” his wife battered at what must have seemed to her my intentional scepticism, though I was prepared to believe that on this occasion she was speaking the truth. “ It’s impossible to tell you how he loves animals. It’s one of those things you can’t explain to people because they’re too gross to understand. He loves animals better than anyone who has ever lived,” she declared in a final assault upon my incredulity, adding, “ except St. Francis of Assisi.”
70 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
And it must have been so, because her husband did not contradict her. There was no sign of annoyance, no sign of amusement, in his grave regard. He accepted the statement without qualification, acknowledging it by his silence to be the exact truth. When he did speak it was to say :
“ I used to be a Christian, but when I became a vegetarian I ceased to be a Christian because Christ ate meat.”
When I first visited him he owned two dogs, large animals, their coats patchy with white and brown, with blood-shot eyes and pendent ears. A month later there were four dogs, later still six, eight. He couldn’t kill them. He couldn’t give them to the Koreans because they would eat them. They were a multiplying problem. He also kept chickens. When they ceased laying he continued to keep them. They had done their life’s work, he told me, and deserved to be pensioned off like other people. He kept horses, goats. I forget how many goats. He kept monkeys. The male was no celibate ; the female quite obviously had reached the age of consent. Indeed, they paraded their incon- tinence in the manner of their species. But they had no issue. That was a pity, because I wanted to see how the problem of a growing
THE UNTYPICAL ENGLISHMAN 71
family of monkeys would have been solved on the principle of take no life.
Yet there are limits. My friends came to England this year on a short visit. Not to see their people, I am convinced, but because it necessitated a clearance of the increasing menagerie. The dogs were given to the Koreans, the monkeys to the zoo. My friends have now returned to Korea. I presume they can make a fresh start with empty kennels and cleaned cages. It would be a favourable opportunity to call upon them before they have time to breed a new colony of dogs. Because those dogs were dangerous. They ranged the countryside, and met you a mile from the house, pursuing you with fierce barkings, and rushing in upon you when you turned your head, so that your final approach was a slow backing up the path with swinging stick. Once they tore my trousers. I suppose it was some consolation to be told, quite truthfully, that it was lucky I was wearing an old suit.
And there are other hmits. During our discussion I asked :
“ How about mosquitoes ? ”
That problem was partly obviated by the doors and windows being screened. The nearest answer I got was when my fiiend rose, swotter in hand, and pursued a buzzing fly.
72 KOREA QF THE JAPANESE
“ If it is necessary to kill,” he told me with a sad seriousness, “ one must do so without the joy of the hunter.” And in the manner of a man performing a distasteful duty he solemnly swotted the fly.
When my wife joined me in Korea we received an invitation to tea. We arrived at the appointed time, fighting our way through the barking dogs. The native woman of clumsy fingers and melan. choly face admitted us rather dubiously. We removed our boots and entered the sitting-room. But no one was at home to receive us. Perhaps a quarter of an hour later the husband appeared, in a villainous old suit, grimed from head to toej his feet naked, his face unshaved, his long hair in wild disorder. He had been gardening, he had been grooming his horse. Would we excuse him, he must have a bath. Another half-hour passed, and the wife appeared. She was hot and moist and apologetic. She had suddenly remembered that we were coming to tea so had had to rush away to the city to buy some cakes . She explained this many times while she disposed parcels about the room. After a further wait tea was served, as I have already described it to you, in courses of fruit at long intervals. Then an argument began to develop between our hostess and the waiting woman. Our hostess rose and began
THE UNTYPICAL ENGLISHMAN 73
to examine her parcels, went into the kitchen, returned and re-examined her parcels, then turned suddenly upon her husband with a plaintive :
“ Oh, Reggie, where have you hidden those cakes ? ”
She had left them in the tram.
But she was only convinced of it after re|)eated denials from Reggie and relentless searchings of the room. She nearly wept.
“ And we never have cakes,” Reggie said ruefully, “ except when visitors come.”
But his wife was considering the disaster from another point of view. “ Never mind ” — she turned to us with a sudden consolation — “ I will post them to you.”
The Japanese and the Koreans found my friend a little incomprehensible. They thought of Englishmen as lords, living in society, elegantly dressed and with refined manners.
“ But he live all alone,” they said. “ Surely that not English custom. Also very dirty, so I think. We see him kiss monkey. Is that English custom to kiss monkey ? ”
“ Well, you see,” I answered, not wishing to betray either my friend or my countrymen, “ he’s a poet. He isn’t typical.”
74 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
“ Of course,” they tittered, having presumably some dim idea that I had made a joke, “ he not typical.”
I intended to convey the impression of some- thing rather fine and unique. But I seem to have failed somehow. It certainly looks as though I shall have to apologize.
VII
KEIJO
IF you look at a map of Korea, unless it is a very recent one, you will find that the capital is named Seoul. This is the Korean name, and seems to be pronounced varyingly as Seyool, Sowl, Sool, Sole. But the Japanese have renamed the city Keijo.
The older residents naturally use the Korean name as they have grown accustomed to it. The missionaries also, but for the added reason that they find a very human satisfaction in annoying the Japanese. Their deliberate use of “ Seoul ” appears to me much like the White Russians’ deliberate use of “ St. Petersburg ” : a refusal to recognize a new and unwelcome order of things. But, whether it really annoys the Japanese, I don’t know.
You may wonder why the Japanese should change the name. As a matter of fact it is a change in pronunciation merely, not in essence. It is due to the use of Chinese characters by both the Japanese and Koreans. The written
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76 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
name remains unaltered. It simply happens that the two characters used are pronounced in one language as Keijo and in the other as Seoul. This applies to all towns in Korea, even to the name of Korea itself, though here the difference is slight : Chosen for Chosun. Usually the difference is more marked than this : Wonsan becomes Gensan ; Kyungju becomes Keishu ; and Chemulpo, the port of Keijo, becomes quite unrecognizable as Jinsen. You see, it is a little confusing, because you must learn a double list of names.
This applies also to the people. When a Korean boy goes to school he is addressed in the Japanese equivalent of his name, just as an English boy named William attending a French school would be addressed as Guillaume. Some- times I found this disconcerting. A student whose name, for instance, was printed in the register as Hyo Bun Kyo would sign himself on his exercises as Pyo Moon Hoo ; and for the most part I only knew the Korean students by their Japanese names. Which probably rankled in their hearts, making them consider me an enemy to their country. At any rate, those who visited me were always careful to let me know, more or less pointedly, the correct pronunciation of their names.
KEIJO 77
But I am really meant to be telling you some- thing of the capital.
Its situation is picturesque in the extreme. It lies in a hollow of granite hills within the elbow of a river. The city proper is withdrawn from the river some two miles, but to the south the hills open in a wide gap through which the city has overflowed to the river bank.
Its relation to the rest of the country is best expressed by saying that it lies midway on the railway that links Japan with Manchuria, being a twelve hours’ train journey both from the northern frontier town of Antung and the southern port of Fusan. Its own port, Jinsen (Chemulpo), lies some twenty-five miles to the west ; and to the east it is connected with the port of Gensan, and by a line continuing north along the coast with the north-eastern frontier, terminating a little inland at the town of Kwainei. The railway system is best visualized as an inverted letter A, in this manner :
Antung
Keijo
Kwainei
Gensan
Fusan
But Kwainei is considerably farther north than Antung, and the Gensan-Fusan line, though
78 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
under construction, is not yet finished. A further port is to be built somewhere to the north-east, and the line continued beyond Kwainei across Manchvuia. When this has been completed Japan will be in absolute control of the Manchurian export trade. And central in this system of commercially strategic railways is the capital.
Tastes differ so, that if you paid a visit to Keijo Fm not sure what you would be interested to see. Possibly the silk and tobacco factories. Yet they are like others of their kind, except that hours are longer and pay less than in Europe — twelve hours a day for seven days a week, for ten to twenty yen (twenty to forty shillings) a month. But for the rest, they have tall brick chimneys, and they hoot the hands to work in the morning exactly as in the West. The Govern- ment building is more attractive, handsomely constructed in granite and with a central dome, approached by a wide, straight road so that its really excellent proportions can be appreciated without straining the neck. Within, it is cool and spacious, the central hall floored and columned with beautiful marble quarried in the country. And it is well situated. Behind it rises the toothed ridge of the northern mountains, setting it in white relief against a wild, dark
<'0\ ERN.ME.N’T hou^^
KEIJO 79
background. But there is more in its situation than thw picturesqueness of contrast. The spot has been most exactly chosen to emphasize a contrast more sinister. That solid and resolute white building, lying like a barrier across the wide, straight road, shuts away behind it the principal imperial palace of Korea. Shuts it away with a deliberate effacement. This is no mere chance symbol. Its significance is intended. And it is not only the present shutting away the past — that is universal, and inevitable — it is Japan shutting away Korea.
Another example of the unpardonable ill- taste of the dominant nation. It is necessary that Japan should shut many doors, but it is not necessary that she should slam them with a calculated provocation in one’s face.
If you climb those northern hills — and you will enjoy the climb — ^you can look down upon the old palace grounds. Here and there the outer walls, crumbling now and falling, can be traced wandering inconsequentially among the magnificent pines. You can see bridges and gateways and a winding stream, the lake with the summer pavilion lying out upon it as though afloat, and standing up somewhat more loftily the throne room, in a rectangular enclosed courtyard, the broad sweep of its ribbed roof
8o KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
uplifted at the corners, giving it the appearance of an enormous tent. All this in itself is not very impressive, being an inferior imitation of the palaces of China. And one knows that it was a centre of ineffective misgovernment and puerile corruption. Yet walled blindly in from all view of the city by that symbol of a foreign but efficient administration, there is a pathos in it, a suggestion. For it is not simply that one finds oneself asking, “ By what right does Japan rule in Korea ? ” The doubt penetrates more deeply : “By what law are the weak devoured of the strong ? ” It is not a human law, for human justice and human pity rebel against it. But it is too powerful for human justice and human pity, because too fundamental. The world is driven along the path of its destiny by forces imperative and ruthless. “ It is the gods, the gods above, that govern our condition. . . .”
Parts of the grounds are open to you. You may rest, for instance, in the summer pavilion, seeming to float upon the water in an enormous barge, shaded from the heat by an immense canopy slenderly columned. But you are not admitted to the throne room. Yet once I found myself there with two friends of mine, as one of the gates of the enclosing wall had been left unlocked. It was an exact replica, except for its
THE summer PA\TI.I0N, THE IMPERIAL PALACE, KEIjO
KEIJO 8i
size, of other rooms in other palaces, an exact replica, for that matter, of temple halls and chambers in rich men’s homes. Built something to one end of the paved courtyard, it stood on a granite base approached by granite steps, with the same grey tiled roof, the same dull red cedar columns, the same walls and doors of fretted wood papered from within, the same elaborately decorative eaves gaudy with the same intricate designs and bright colours which are universal in the more sumptuous buildings of Korea. The East is repetitive and monotonous. But inside was the old throne : a rather uncomfort- able double chair of wood set on a dais and surmounted by a dragon canopy. In the dim and empty interior it showed forlorn and faded. It was difficult to imagine it the scene of a vanished splendour.
It was very dim in the interior, because the door swung to behind us with a clang, locking us in. I can’t tell you how long we struggled at that lock. And we were afraid to shout because we were on forbidden ground. There was no knowing how the Japanese authorities would have interpreted our trespass. You see, we had cameras with us. One of my companions, a Father of the English Church, dressed in a long, black cassock and with a crucifix at his
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breast, kept repeating, “ Really, you know, this is most distressing. . .
If you wish to avoid a similar mishap you may see quite enough to satisfy you in the East Palace. This is now a public recreation ground, with zoo attached, and restaurants, and a lake where you can skate daily for two months of the winter. There is also an avenue of cherry-trees, planted by the Japanese, a magnificent sight towards the end of April, especially when illuminated at night ; and seasonal displays of peonies and chrysanthemums. But even if you cannot time your visit for any of these, there are other more serious interests. The halls and pavilions, of similar design to the throne room, are spaced in pleasant isolation among the trees. For the Korean fashion is not to set up a single immense block of buildings in the centre of a park, but to disperse the chambers so as to cover the whole ground. The suggestion is one of leisurely charm, of commodious ease. But these chambers now are used as a museum, to house such scanty treasures of pottery, painting and sculpture as Korea possesses. Also you can obtain per- mission to visit the summer gardens, enclosed behind the public grounds. Here you will see other halls and courtyards, more dreamlike, more dainty, and brooklets and lakelets and
IHK JHRONE room, the IMI'ERIAI. palace, KEIiO
KEIJO 83
winding paths, where the Emperor amused himself with his concubines in a manner befitting the despot of an oppressed and impoverished land.
Keijo once possessed a city wall. The northern half of it still remains, though in varying stages of decay. It was not built four-square like the wall of Peking, but on the principle of a child’s afternoon scramble. You can see it suddenly running up to the very tops of the pinnacled hills, pausing a moment, as it were, to look round and recover breath, then plunging for the valleys in a wild glissade down precipitous slopes. And the top, shaped in steps, gives it the appearance of holding itself erect, mounting on its toes, descending on its heels. Here and there the archers’ loop-holes are still intact, slanting downwards ; but one fails entirely to trace the strategic plan of its construction. It winds and doubles upon itself in a manner seriously to increase its length, and embraces so wide a sweep of mountain far outside the last houses of the city, that one wonders how it could ever have been manned. But to follow its caprices is an interesting Sunday occupation, and from its higher vantages one can see the city in a wide perspective impossible from the streets.
Speaking roughly, the city is quartered by two
84 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
great thoroughfares, running from north to south and from east to west. There are others, amply proportioned, parallel to these. Three main roads open out into the country ; south across the river, east, and north-west through a gap in the hills — called the Peking Pass — to Chemulpo and the sea. This gap is called the Peking Pass because it was by this road that the Chinese envoys used to come, in the days of China’s suzerainty, to collect tribute from Korea. The King — he was only a king then — used to meet them at a point outside the West Gate. Now at that point there is a stone arch, called Independence Arch, built when the Japanese liberated Korea from the overlordship of China. It was then that the King became an Emperor, which in the East means the monarch of an independent state. But Independence Arch will hardly tempt you to waste a film. It is a shabby little affair, already showing ominous cracks. And it does not even span the road, but stands to one side as though pushed there in deliberate and contemptuous neglect, A fit symbol of Korean independence.
The hills that bound the city on the west drop in lessening humps towards the river — ^they are a favoured locality for the foreign residents, whose houses you can see there standing red-bricked
KEIJO 85
and conspicuous in a lordly dominance of the hovels below — ^but on the east the hills fail for a space, to rise again between the East Gate and the South Gate to a solitary cone, the Nam San. One picnics there quite frequently, dreaming away the splendid afternoon among twisted pines and granite boulders. On the slope that overlooks the city the Japanese have built a Shinto shrine. It is approached by a magnifi- cent, wide staircase of granite, between granite lanterns and granite torii gates, and stands on a natural platform beneath a rocky and pre- cariously timbered cliff. A level road, lined with hanging lanterns, curves away around the hill, giving by frequent steep descents on to the main Japanese quarter of the city. But if you climb upwards in an attempt to reach the summit you will find your way barred by barbed wire. If, however, you persist, you will come upon further remains of the old wall on the very peak. But actually to climb to the peak is forbidden, as the barbed wire suggests, because from here you look down upon the Shinto shrine, an insult to the gods. Yet the peak has an interest of its own. It was here that in the old days a beacon lay ready for kindling — the climax of a series that encircled the country — to warn the Emperor in his palace of coming danger. Not, presumably,
86 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
that he might summon his army to meet it, but that he might summon his personal retainers to carry him to safety in one of his mountain retreats. But there is no beacon on Nam San now ; and even to stand upon the spot is an offence because of that shrine of an alien worship which has usurped the slope below.
Yet Keijo is not merely a tilting ground for Japan and Korea, with Japan inevitably victorious. It is a tilting ground for East and West, with the West not so inevitably victorious because robbed of its conquest by parody and distortion. You will look in a shop window and see two Koreans sitting on the floor with a Singer sewing-machine between them, one turn- ing the handle and the other manipulating the cloth. You will see a Japanese in frock coat and bowler hat, but with naked feet shod in flat, wooden clogs. And you will see brick houses and trams and cars, and you will hear music played on pianos and violins. But the houses are built at all angles ; in the trams the passengers deposit their packages on the seats and them- selves remain standing ; the cars, intended to accommodate four or five, are provided with an extra bench to accommodate three more, so that you must climb over the back wheel to enter, tie your luggage on to the footboards and
KEIJO 87
the radiator, and submit to an unrelenting and excruciating cramp ; and the noises that issue from the pianos and the violins are so per- severingly discordant that one is obliged to impute to the performers some hideous male- volence towards all mankind. But it is sufficient merely to see these people in Western clothes. They know neither how to make nor how to wear them. The trousers, except that they open in front — quite obviously ! — might by their shape be reversible. They divide a full six inches too low. They are of the American pattern — that is, supported by a belt instead of braces ; but the Easterner has no hips, and the belt is certain to miss a loop or two, so when the jacket is off, which is frequent, the trousers hang from the waist in uncertain festoons overlapped by tags of shirt. Boots may or may not be worn ; but, in any case, as the Korean must remove his boots before entering his house it is more convenient to wear them without laces. In summer it is cooler to discard the outer garments altogether and dress in vest and pants alone. Fly buttons appear to be worn as ornaments.
All this would not vastly matter if it were merely an affair of sartorial incongruity. But one cannot avoid the implication in it of a fundamental attitude, a vital misconception.
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For the East wears our thoughts as it wears our clothes.
So it is best to escape to the native quarters where the people can live their own lives in their own manner. That is, to escape from Keijo to Seoul. But that will need another chapter.
VIII
THE PEKING PASS
Not long since, I received from the Poetess a delicately bound volume of delicate verse.* The themes are mostly of Japan, which the Poetess knew and loved ; but a few are of Korea, which she is learning to know and love. Their atmosphere is one of wistful enchant- ment ; they set you listening as though for echoes. In writing to express my thanks I said, intending the highest of compliments, that they were reading for the evening, before a blazing fire, with a pipe on. And among them is one entitled “ The Road to Peking.” I have it before me now. This is how it begins :
Between the hills it winds away — the high road to Peking. The bullock carts go down it in a long, unbroken string ; The rickshas and the buses, a shabby palanquin,
An old man like a drowsy god nods wearily within. Dreaming of days when men were proud to own a palanquin.
Now motor-cars sweep by him and cover him with dust ;
* “ Lanterns by the Lake,” by Joan S. Grigsby. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trfibner & Co., Ltd., London.
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His gold-embroidered curtains aresoiled with moth and rust. And no one asks his bearers who the rich man is they bring Through crowds that throng at twilight the highway to Peking ;
For no one cares that once he was a courier to a king.
This suggests to me that I might recommend you to pay a visit to the road of the Peking Pass. You may see a great deal of Seoul here without burrpwing too intimately among the alleys. If you are a poet like my friend the street may fill for you with the splendour of old pageantries, and a gentle melancholy will invade you brooding on departed things. But I cannot work that spell for you. On the hill-tops I had my visions too ; but in the streets the actual made too close a contact. I had eyes only for the visible, ears only for the audible, and a nose ... I could willingly have dispensed with a nose. . . .
However, as an introduction to Seoul, I cannot advise you better than to take a leisurely stroll the length of the Peking Pass.
Imagine it a wide street, unpaved — except on occasions when cart-loads of loose shingle are emptied upon it to be swiftly absorbed at the first rain — flanked to either side by low, tiled- roofed, open-fi*onted shops, paraded by unhasting white figures, surmounted by a serene blue sky. A picture in slow motion, drab in colour except
THE PEKING PASS 91
on days of festival, yet dazzling with the glare of glossy white robes in the relentless sunshine. And at every yard something to arrest you, to amuse you, possibly to shock you, to set you speculating, and if you have the photographic itch, to keep your camera in a continuous clicking.
You will soon recognize the most distinctive features. Oxen, single or in file, are bringing fuel in from the hills, or are drawn up by the road-side where they will stand all day till the fuel is sold. They are stacked high with bundles of pine branches, acacia branches, scrapings of twigs and leaves and needles bound about with ropes of straw. Stacked so high, and with the flanking bundles drooping so close to the ground, that the beasts are completely enveloped and submerged, and appear to be pushing through a tunnel of undergrowth. But they are very strong and very patient, and in as little hurry as their masters, who walk before them leading them by a rope attached to a ring through the nose. The ox should be the national emblem of Korea.
The poorer fuel-gatherers who cannot afford oxen must be their own beasts of burden. You will see them, too, bringing their loads in from the hills. They carry them on a wooden structure at the back, chair-like except that it
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possesses only a single pair of legs, supported by shoulder-loops of straw rope. This structure is called a jigi, and the load it enables a man it carry is stupendous. A station porter, for instance, will take a couple of large trunks as well as odds and ends of suit-cases at a single journey. The secret is balance. The ngi is set on the ground and supported at a slight forward angle by a forked staff. It is then packed, everything being tightly corded in place. The bearer backs himself against it at a squat, slips his arms through the shoulder-straps, removes the supporting staff, and using the staff to steady himself, slowly rises. Once on his feet he maintains the balance of his load by a gentle forward lean of his body, and is prepared to tramp for miles beneath a weight of two hundred pounds. When he wishes to rest he steadies himself to a squat by means of his staff, adjusts the fork of the staff in the jigi^ and releases himself^ the jigi remaining ready for him when he wishes to resume his journey. Indeed, the jigi is one of those excellent contrivances which seem to have developed like the limbs of the body itself in response to a vital demand. Korea is a land of mountains where the paths are on an everlasting gradient. A man needs his hands free, and a staff to stay him from slipping. The
THE jUIl-MAN
THE PEKING PASS 93
Chinaman’s bamboo pole, with the loads slung at either end, is suitable for the plains but not for the hills. The Korean jigi, with its security of structure, and the ease with which it is discarded and resumed, is adapted with the perfection of something natural to the exigencies of mountain travel. . . . And in the road of the Peking Pass you will see jigi loads of fuel between the waiting oxen stacked half as high again as a man.
Women will pass you in the street with tubs and buckets of washing on their heads, going out to the streams in the morning and returning in the evening. If you stroll down the road to where a bridge crosses a sewer you ran see them squatting in sociable groups beating their washing with wooden clubs. Beside them there may be a bucket on an open fire with the clothes boiling within. For the clothes are first ripped apart, then boiled in lye, which may be done either at home or by the waterside. After this comes the beating, which is always done in the open, even in midwinter when the ice is thick. They are beaten on a flat stone, with frequent rinsings, laid out in the sun to dry, then taken home and once more beaten, this time not to clean but to iron them, and finally, of course, put together again. It is a long process, and one would imagine fatiguing. But it is the Korean woman’s
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social occupation. She never washes alone, but in company, and probably finds the task as enjoyable as the Western woman’s knitting. Folk who confuse innovation with progress talk of soap and wringers and flat-irons, not to mention sewing-machines to save the labour of repeated rippings and joinings. But as the seams are pasted together the sewing-machine is a doubtful blessing. Also the result is so excellent, the white robes shine with so beautiful a gloss, that it seems impertinent to talk of soap and wringers and flat-irons. Besides, they are per- fectly happy, these women. If Korea should ever adopt a Soviet Government the flag would be a jigi above crossed washing clubs on a quartered field of white and cerulean blue.
These, then, you will observe everywhere and at once, the loaded men and the washing women.
And meanwhile through another organ you will become aware of a very definite atmosphere. You will probably look askance at the sewers, perhaps keeping to the middle of the road. The sewers certainly have a savour, but not over- powering, though a little unpleasant diuing long spells of drought. But it is not the sewers that are distressing you ; it is the pervading reek of kimchi, the Korean pickle. In autumn, when the pickle is made, the reek becomes nauseating,
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but throughout the year it haunts you. I have described the smell elsewhere as that of sour vinegar. I must confess that I have never smelt sour vinegar. I do not even know whether vinegar can turn sour. But if vinegar can turn sour I should imagine it would smell like kimchi. That is th6 best I can do for you. And it will follow you everywhere, just as the smell of garlic will follow you everywhere in China. It is best to make up your mind that it is inevitable — and dismiss it. Otherwise you may be unhappy.
You will have an eye, of course, for the stores and the street vendors. The stores are open to the street, usually overflowing on to the street itself, spanning the inevitable sewer by a plat- form of boards. They are open from early morning till late at night, and for seven days in the week. But there is no strain, no fatigue, no hurry. There is a whole family from grand- parents to grandchildren to attend to the casual customers, and one can sleep by day as well as by night, and one is not enslaved to the counter. You will see brass-ware, eind brass-bound chests, and canoe-shaped shoes in rows like boats drawn up on the beach ; and grain in flat, round baskets, and white cabbage stacked on the ground, and pears and melons, and fish. Dried fish, dead beyond redemption, as though from centuries of
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smoking and salting. You must soak it a fortnight, I am told — and I believe it — before it is ready for use. Then, I am also told, it makes an excellent dish ; but I prefer to reserve judgment. Here and there are sweet-vendors, boys mostly with trays slung from their shoulders, shaking great scissors over slabs and twists of inconceivable candies. These are made of sorghum cane or barley malt, with a scattering it may be of soya beans. As a matter of fact, the twisted kind, a dirty cream in colour, has a distinctly pleasant relish. Merely it is difficult to bring oneself to the first sampling. In season you can buy roasted chestnuts. The vendors, boys again, set up iron braziers, known as wharros, where they roast their chestnuts in wire baskets over a charcoal fire, arranging the nuts in little piles of a dozen or so to be sold at a farthing the pile. Poorer folk sit by the sides of the street before trays of wares that could be purchased for a couple of shillings : hanks of unbleached yam, children’s story-books gaudy with pictures, a handful of pea-nuts, slices of juicy, red water-melon. You might think that if you offered to buy up such a man’s stock he would be grateful to you. But, on the contrary, he would refuse to sell. He must retain some- thing to continue trade. In summer you will
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see women outside their doorways boiling herb soups or frying pancakes, and men “ kneading ” dough. This is really interesting. The opera- tion requires three men. The dough, sad and pallid, is laid in a lump on a board. Two men with enormous mallets stand over it and pound it strenuously, as though driving in stakes. The third, squatting beside it, slaps it with his hand between blows. The precise virtue of his function I have never been able to understand. The pounding continues for hours till the dough is belaboured to a heavy slab. The resulting bread is what might be expected. Your jaws will ache with chewing, but you will never reduce it to a consistency fit to swallow. . . . And over the fruit and the fish and the candies, the soups and the pancakes and the dough, the dust blows down in a cloud and the flies settle.
The muleteers come slowly, riding on their heavy packs. Small mules, half hidden by the loads, sweat streaming down their backs.
Ah ! the shouting and the straining and the pulling as they
go,
Beaten when they move too quickly, beaten when they move too slow.
Like mules on the Peking highway three hundred years ago. Beyond the dty gateway, beyond the broken wall,
Where, from the shattered rampart, great blocks of stone- work fall.
Into the purple mountain the long road winds away.
H
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Do shadows from those ramparts Icao to watch at close of day
The lights that move and vanish along the great high- way. ...
There are not many beggars here, as it is off the main routes, but a little boy may attach himself to you, piteously entreating for a sen : “ Toon il-jeun ch'eupsio ! ” He will be grimed and ragged, and his face expressive of unimaginable anguish. He will hold out a hand, bobbing up and down from the hips, and will follow you persistently till you satisfy him or till he spies another more likely patron. But you will do well to keep your money. It will not go to the boy, but to his master who sets the child to beg, perhaps maiming him for the purpose, certainly in winter sending him out half naked into the cold, to live himself on the profits.
There are other things you will see. Old men squatting in groups smoking long pipes, chatting together throatily, and nonchalantly rolling back their clothing in a leisurely search for lice ; and children with babies strapped to their backs playing in the mud of the gutters ; and young men stripped to the waist washing themselves and one another, or with their mouths in a foam vigorously scrubbing their teeth. But then, this is not Seoul ; this is Keijo intruding again ; for
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washing is an innovation from Japan. If you are fortunate you will see a funeral or a wedding ; and you will certainly see all that you are likely to of the customary costumes of the people.
The women are full-skirted and short-bodiced with bunchy enfoldings about the waist. In summer the bodices are so short that the breasts protrude beneath, for the better convenience of the babies strapped behind who can be drawn round for nourishment or comfort. If in full dress, they wear also a long robe. The hair is oiled to a black smoothness, parted down the middle, and gathered into a tight knot at the neck. In winter a curious hat appears. It is best described as two cheek-pieces joined at the front and back, but left open at the top. It is made of black figured silk, and decorated at the brow with a coloured tassel. In the extreme cold a long wadded cloth is bound round the head, covering the ears and falling to the waist. The women show little expression in their faces, except when they are angry ; though those in their twenties, with their smooth, full cheeks and their sharp, clear brows, have a certain Madonna-like placidity, not without charm. And they are boldly formed, and walk sturdily, but with little grace.
The men are enormously pantalooned, and
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wear loose waistcoat-like upper garments knotted at the right breast. Like the women, they wear a long robe when in full dress. Their faces are long and solemn, but yielding readily to laughter. In their forties they cultivate goatee beards. They walk slowly, with a majestic dignity, erect and in perfect poise.
Yet at first, possibly, you may not notice all this, because you will be scrutinizing with an amused curiosity the men’s amazing head-gear, the most patently absurd, surely, in the world. Yet there is a reason in it. Its purpose is, to protect, not the head, but the top-knot. When a Korean boy attains to manhood — that is, when he marries, say at fifteen or sixteen — his hair is gathered up on the top of his head into a short, tight knot. The loose lower hairs are held in place by a band of black gauze firmly secured about the head with thongs. Over this is a black gauze cage, within which you can see the top-knot like the first sprouting of some delicate plant sheltered from the weather. Set on the cage, some inches above the head, is the hat itself. It is a light structure of horsehair, some- times straw-coloured, sometimes black. To picture its shape, imagine a child’s sand castle on a large plate. It is held in place by long, black ribbons which tie under the chin. The
THE PEKING PASS
lOI
Korean’s dignified walk has in it a suggestion of being conscious of this hat, as though an awkward movement or a lapse from the upright would topple it from his head.
All this you can see in the road of the Peking Pass. And nightly in the summer the street is set with stalls which are lit with lamps and lanterns, though in the city itself they are lit with electricity ; and for three hours the place is white with the robes of loungers and strollers and loud with the cries of the vendors, while from within the houses comes the clatter of the ironing clappers, a noise musical, persistent, and unlocatable like the chirruping of crickets. It will ring in your ears half through the night, like a resonance of the atmosphere. It is the voice of Korea, just as the top-knot is its visible symbol and kimchi is its odour.
Do shadows from those ramparts lean to watch at close of day
The lights that move and vanish along the great highway, As once they watched and challenged the scout of Genghis Khan
Who rode through these same mountains down to the river Hahn,
Telling of great countries and of a greater king Beyond the purple mountains and the roadway to Peking ? Maybe that rampart echoed the song he came to sing.
Ah ! long, grey road you wind away beyond the saffron sky. Luring beyond the city gate the dreams of such as I
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To gateways at your other end where still the merchants bring
Their painted fans, their carven jade, and many a silver ring.
To market down the road of dreams — the high road to Peking.
I think, after all, the Poetess is right. The audible and the vdsible reveal so little of any people. Perhaps of this people least of all. For how should the actual concern them ? With heads arrayed in such hats they are like a nation of priests dedicated to some fabulous and fantastic deity of dreams.
IX
SEOUL
Turning from the main streets you can plunge at a venture into any of the alleys — rabbit-like into a maze of burrows. For instance, having sufficiently wandered the Peking Pass and assured yourself that the Independence Arch is worth no more than a casual regard, you can take the first opening that offers on the other side of the road and make your way up to the city wall which you can see outlining the crest of the slope above you, with, if you wish as a more precise objective, the house of the Poetess which stands up in lordly detachment beside an immense Ginko tree. You can see the wall from the road, that is ; but once among the alleys it is blotted out, except for occasional glimpses in unexpected places. Yet you will expect to emerge beneath it after no very long walk, as it cannot be more than three or four himdred yards distant. But the probability is, unless you are very fortunate, that you will wander perhaps a couple of miles before you reach it, and then it
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will be in some spot remote from your aim. Not merely because of the windings of the alleys, but because of their innumerable dead ends bringing you up short in blind comers of walls and against barricading doorways, compelling you to double upon your tracks and seek for other outlets in a growing bewilderment of disorientation. For there is no traceable scheme in these narrow, twisting passages. They appear as fortuitous cracks merely between the hovels which them- selves seem like some natural fungus of the soil. Yet persist ; and do not be perturbed if the suspicion increases upon you that you are lost. Take the opportunity to look about you ; for this is Seoul.
The alleys are unpaved, as you have expected, so that with every shower they lie deep in mud. For this emergency the Koreans have a wooden clog, canoe-shaped, and raised several inches on cleats ; a contrivance on which you will look with envy. But there are steeper places where there is no mud, because here the naked granite pushes bare. Possibly hacked into rough steps, very rough, and far from level, negotiable only with extreme care in frosty weather. For this, too, the Koreans have provided. Their ordinary straw sandal — ^which you will wear yourself when you go into the mountains — keeps them steady
KOKKAN STRKi:i
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105
on the steepest and most slippery slopes. But for you in your Western boots, particularly if they are rubber-soled, you are unlucky. '
To one side of you is a wall, to the other an open sewer, as wide or wider than the alley itself. It is well excavated and lined with granite. The bottom runs with a thin trickle of water over a bed of muddy ooze, except in the rainy season, when it becomes a torrent. Stone slabs bridge it at intervals where doors open. Children play there ; and into it latrines drain and garbage-boxes overflow.
Perhaps a beggar will pass you, lank-haired, clad in inconceivable foul rags, poking among these garbage-boxes for cabbage stalks and fish bones.
Through the open doors you can look into diminutive courtyards, set with innumerable earthenware jars of every size — reminding you of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves — stored, you must imagine, with rice and beans and millet and, of course, kimchi. Facing you across the court- yard is a raised platform, roofed over by the projecting eaves of the room behind which shuts firom sight the women’s courtyard beyond. On this platform men may be squatting, lost in contemplation and smoke. The courtyard may be a yard square with the platform in proportion
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with nothing to gaze upon but the jars or possibly a comer of flowers ; yet except in the shelters of the outcasts it is inevitably there, sacred to meditation like the cloisters of a monastery.
The outer door opens, not through a single wall, but between rooms ; to be precise, between the kitchen and the latrine. The kitchen is clear to view, a mere roofed space, earth-floored, set with a low stove by which women squat boiling soup and rice in shallow iron pans. There is no oven. And the stove-fire passes by flues under the floors of the rooms, and the smoke issues by chimneys no higher than your knee, filling the alleys with a blue haze.
You may see a house or two in the building. First a stout wooden framework held together by wooden pegs. The walls are mere fillings. The lower part, some four feet high, consists of a muddy cement set with a patchwork of stones. The stones are tied together with string to keep them in place while the cement sets ; and where an old wall begins to crumble you will see the string exposed. Above this base the walls are continued for another two feet or so with a hempen mesh fiOUed with mud and plastered white. In it are inserted minute windows opaquely papered. Not for looking through, as they are above eyedevel for the inmates sitting
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on the floor within, but merely to give light. The roofs are of unshaped timbers, thatched for the most part — tiles being a sign of opulence — 2ind projecting in deep eaves. These are so low that you must stoop to pass beneath them. The effect may be picturesque enough when the plaster and cement are fresh ; but the heavy rains play havoc with the muddy structures, and the walls rapidly crumble. They bulge, lean awry, crack, gape away from their frames. But the frames hold secure, and patching is quick and easy. Nevertheless, the squat huddling of the hovels, the purposeless twisting of the alleys, the sewers, the refuse, and the smoke, give an impression of meanness and confinement, of instability and decay, wretched, shabby and discomforting, as though the people had somehow lost heart.
This impression may be entirely erroneous. For the folk are coritented ; the children are sturdy and full of play. And one must not judge the Eastern house by Western requirements. In the West the house is the home ; but not in the East. In the blue Korean weather the house need be little more than a temporary shelter during the rains and the cold. The people live in the streets. In the summer they cook in the streets, sleep in the streets. At night, passing
io8 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
down the alleys, you must step over prostrate bodies coiled on mats laid on the earth. Within the house it is too hot ; and there are multi- tudinous vermin. But lying in one’s garments in the open air one keeps pleasantly warm, and moderately free from irritation. In winter, the more confined the room the cosier the atmo- sphere. If there is just space on the heated floor for the entire family to stretch itself, that is a completely adjusted economy. And with the whole day in the open to make up for arrears of fresh air, it is not so unsanitary as it may seem. Which brings us to a consideration of those uncovered sewers. Breeding-places for disease, you might think. Yet being uncovered they are wide to the sun. And the fact is, that during any typhoid epidemic it is the clean Japanese who die, not the dirty Koreans. There is probably a heavy infant mortality, but those who survive are surprisingly immune from pestilence. One cannot resist a certain sceptical questioning of our medicine and sanitation which barricade us behind a timid cleanliness, outside of which, poor weaklings that we have become, it grows increasingly dangerous to stray. Yet that is not the complete truth either. For the Japanese have banished smallpox and cholera from which even the Koreans were not immune.
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Here among the alleys, then, you are at the heart of Seoul. And you need not feel the least uneasiness. No one will molest you, unless to be greeted by the children as you pass with shrill cries of “ Goo-bye ! ” constitutes a molestation. An unaccompanied lady at night is as secure here as in her own home. But squalid as the alleys may appear, do not imagine that you are in the slums. This represents the city’s normal level. There are grades above it, and there are grades below.
The grades above I associate with a certain Mr. Yi. He was brought to me one day by a student of mine. He had heard about me, he said, with much bowing — to be precise, he had heard that I was “ clevah teachah,” which I modestly denied — and he wished to make my “ icquaintince.” For what possible reason I haven’t yet been able to conceive ; except that one rapidly came to suspect all such seekers of acqauintance of desiring to improve their English, and one avoided familiarity with what polite evasions one could. But I didn’t avoid Mr. Yi. Perhaps he was too tenacious. Or perhaps I spied in his companionship an advantage to myself. Because he invited me to his summer- house outside the city wall, and promised me eniriesy besides, otherwise denied me. He was obviously a youth of means, and something of a
no KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
dandy. He came dressed in Western style, in a white drill “ two-piece ” suit as the summer had already set in. He wore gold rings on his fingers, a jewelled tie-pin, and a flower in his buttonhole. His full face, clear and soft of skin, pinkly tinted, and no more than a shade darker than my own, showed him well fed and unaccustomed to labour. In fact, he had some- thing of the sleek embonpoint of a silkworm about to cast its sixth skin. Yet he was clearly uncom- fortable. He kept his fan in a constant flutter, opening his coat and easing his collar away from his neck. However, he was very amiable ; and I readily accepted his invitation.
He took me to a point to the north-east of the city, just outside the wall, which we scaled by a breach. Here I foimd a romantic valley, the slopes clothed in twisted pine, where a narrow path followed the windings of a stream which flowed crystal-clear among rocks. It proved to be a paradise of summer-houses to which Mr. Yi possessed some mysterious right of entry. He had merely to stand at a gate and clap his hands, and a servant appeared, bowed, threw the gate wide, and ushered us in. We followed enchant- ing paths among trees and boulders, every more picturesque comer set with a pavilion where one could repose in shade and admire the savage
Sl'M MKR RK 1 KKA I
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attitude of some ancient pine, the strenuous poise of some enormous rock, the stillness of a deep pool, the plunging of a cascade. And the main house itself would possess something of this fairy quality of the surrounding gardens. It was built as tilways on the courtyard plan. But the courtyards were daintily planted with flowering shrubs, set with stone lanterns, laid with straight, flagged paths possibly with a goldfish pool in the centre. Outside was the beauty of nature. Within was the beauty of art. Beauty tamed and ordered to flatter some more subtle sense than a mere rapturous response to the splendid and the uncouth. But in either case, beauty to be con- templated and admired. For enclosing the courtyards, or perhaps facing them to one end only, were verandaed rooms where one could sit as in the pavilions to gaze and meditate. And above one’s head the sweeping tiled roofs curved up with an airy lift like a bird’s wings.
But amusement was not entirely aesthetic. There were stages for the dancing-girls, a necessary seasoning to any pleasure.
As for Mr. Yi, he was not master himself of such splendour. His own house was a miniature affair, his courtyard a confined enclosure possess- ing a single persimmon tree, and his garden had been given over to a vineyard. But we sat on
1 12 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
the veranda and talked together, and ate name- less delicacies and drank wine, and could imagine ourselves if we wished in one of those more spacious pavilions with the dancing-girls posing for us in long-sleeved silken robes and black coils of jewelled hair.
But Seoul has still one sight for you. To see it in its full significance you should make your visit in the winter. On the surrounding hills, particularly to the west, the homeless folk gather and dig holes in the earth, covering them with ra^ and mats. Entire families live in these holes, begging their bread by day or grubbing it fi-om the garbage-boxes. And they light fires with such scrapings of leaves as they can gather, huddling close for warmth in an atmosphere thick with smoke. Yet they endure the winter, though some of them die. One pities them, of course ; it is impossible not to. But it is wise to avoid indignation. Conditions may be against them. They may be victims of a social system. But the Koreans are so completely Christian in the one respect of taking no thought for the morrow that you may be certain that many of these people have sold their houses during the summer to satisfy a temporary craving for a bicycle or a pair of Western boots, or simply to indulge in one evening of glorious debauch ; and
SEOUL
”3
now they are without shelter. Besides, on waste land you can see the mud hovels of more provident squatters. They also were homeless ; but they have grown a crop of millet in the thin soil of the hills, and at the expense of a few days’ labour have put up at least a room with a roof, no very artistic affair, being patched with old boxes and mats and flattened oil tins, but large enough to store a jar or two of grain in and to sleep with stretched-out limbs. These hole- dwellers could presumably do the same. But, theorize as you wish, there they are, the unfortunate and the failures. You can see them by their holes amid a litter of refuse sorting out the revolting offal they have gathered from the streets. And you will contrast them, inevitably, with the wealthy aesthetes to whom nature is a spectacle to be contemplated in detached serenity. But that demands comfort and a full stomach.
After all, in essentials, does the East difier so much from the West? In Korea the rich mam and the poor have precisely the same social sense as their counterparts in England.
So back to the alleys, and you will find those low, thatched houses by compaurison unexpectedly cheerful auid commodious. You will not think of them now as hovels, but as bourgeois villais, substantiad, smug and prim.
I
SHOPS AND SHOPPING
YOU will sec many tailors, both Japanese and Korean, but you will patronize the China- man, Yuan Tai. This Celestial, whose own trousers divide six inches too low and termi- nate six inches too high and are, moreover, to all appearance reversible, will produce for you anything from a dress-suit to a pair of hiking shorts of irreproachable shape and fit. And having a monopoly of these things among the foreigners he will not charge you more than fifty per cent, above European prices. His monopoly is due not merely to his own dexterity, but to the incompetence of his competitors. Which might tempt one from insignificant sartorial considerations to considerations of racial moment. The Japanese are universally credited with a genius for imitation. As a nation of imitators they are unsurpassed, but as individuals they make a poor second to the Chinese. The Japanese will organize a business on Western lines, but the Chinaman makes the better
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mason, carpenter, bricklayer, tailor, bootmaker. For you will also go to the Chinaman, Mei Wha, for your boots. But perhaps the most delightful characteristic df the Chinese workman is that he is never without a contrivance or a remedy. Where the Korean and the Japanese will shake their heads with a smiling, “ Cannot. I am sorry for you,” the Chinaman always “ Can do.” Whether to make or to mend, he is equally resourceful, and when he is baffled it means simply that the problem you have set him is beyond all human ingenuity. The lover’s task in the old English song, “ to make a cambric shirt without any needle or needle-work,” would not have disconcerted him ; and he would have put Humpty-Dumpty together again with a few rivets.
When the great bronze bell arrived firom Loughborough for the English Cathedral in Keijo, the architect saw no hope of hauling it into place without bringing the whole belfiry down with a crash. But the Chinese workmen were not dismayed by his theoretic resistances and strains. They rigged up a crude engine of ropes and beams which sent the architect running for safety. He washed his hands of the affair, and retired into hiding, he told me, in a nervous prostration. But when he ventured forth again the bell was serenely installed.
ii6 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
But your most delightful dealings with the Chinese will be your bargainings with the “ Lace- man.” To enjoy this to the full you should spend a few weeks at the foreign holiday resort at Wonsan Beach. The summer heat will drive you from the city to the mountains or the sea, and unless you leave the country you won’t do much better than Wonsan. The foreigners have pmchased a long stretch of beach there in a pictimesque bay, set with islands, backed by mountains, and have built wooden holiday shanties among a plantation of low pines. The shanties consist largely of windows, unglazed, but provided with shutters against the rain, and netted against mosquitoes. Yet the mosquitoes penetrate, and it is as well to have a supply of incense-sticks to burn in the evening. There is a meeting-hall on the Beach, a boarding-house, tennis courts, a golf course, and a Korean junk in attendance for bathers. The atmosphere is somewhat female and very missionary, as, other than missionaries, there are comparatively few foreigners in Korea. Alcohol is prohibited, tobacco is grudgingly tolerated, and “ there is a sentiment against bathing on Sunday.” The weather in the summer alternates between scorching suns and drenching rains. On clear days the heat sets in at eight in the morning ;
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but usually at ten a relieving breeze springs up. If not, there is no alternative but to creep into such shade as the pines afford and refrain from all motion. Of course one can bathe, but the hundred yards or so to the sea is a labour not to be too frequently undertaken, and to remain on the sand, which scorches your feet through your shoes and which offers not a single inch of shelter, is unthinkable. However, the bathing, when you do venture to the water, is superb. There is no tide. The sea is warm and trans- parent, glass-smooth in calm weather, and after a sudden typhoon heaved into magnificent rollers which you can ride like horses. Also, the nights are invariably cool. But you see, although there are tennis courts and a golf course, there is little opportunity for exercise except before breakfast and after supper. The heat wiU not permit it. For occupation there is bridge for the ungodly, and ice-cream tea-parties for both ungodly and devout. There is, moreover, a weekly concert in the meeting-hall, very amateur but very well meant, which provides a certain unintentional comic relief. But such a pro- gramme leaves weary gaps. And this is why one welcomes the Lace-man.
He comes to you drowsing on your hammock ; or you hear his voice under the window, “ Lady
ii8 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
wantce lace ? ” You summon him. He squats on his haunches before you, his lean face in a charming smile, and unslings the two packages from either end of his bamboo shoulder-pole, while the air fills with the reek of garlic. He carefully unwraps his wares, displaying them for you one by one, refolding them and setting them aside. Not lace alone, but five o’clock tea- cloths daintily embroidered with gateways and pagodas and diminutive figures of Celestials, with napkins to match, other cloths for nameless inutilities ornate with immense golden dragons, table-runners and cushion-covers in blue silken tapestries, long gowns of pongee silk. You select an article, lay it apart ; another ; your pile grows ; you compare, consider. There is no hurry. Eventually you offer a price. The Lace- man breaks into a bright laugh as though at a merry jest, and begins to pack up his goods. “ Then how much ? ” you ask. He doubles your figure. You increase your offer a fraction ; he descends a fraction to meet you. It is now your turn to make a stand. “ You too dear,” you say ; and you pick up a book and assume a complete indifference. He assails you, shaking the articles at you, crying, “ How muchee ? How muchee ? Last price how muchee ? ” You repeat your figure, which he greets with
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another laugh, but this time edged with scorn. “ No can do,” he declares. He becomes plaintive : “ Me velly poor man. You velly rich lady. You number one rich lady. You plenty money. How muchee ? Last price how muchee ? ” You remain firm. He begins to pack up his goods again, perhaps really packs them up, perhaps leaves the house. But he returns ; if not the same day, then the next, and the day after, till the bargain is concluded. Concluded, if you are obstinate, at your own terms. At the end he makes semblance of elaborate calculations, then throws the articles at you with a gesture of despair : “ Velly cheaf ; too cheaf. Me lose plenty money.” And the following day you hear his voice again, “ Lady wantee lace ? ” Of course you chide him archly, “ But last time you lose plenty money, why you come again ? ” . . . It is an excellent pastime.
In much the same manner Korean hawkers besiege you in your city home ; but there time is of more account, and the charm has gone. Most patient people, these hawkers. They do not argue with you, do not overwhelm you with pitiful entreaties. They squat at your door for an hour or so until somehow they become admitted. Then they spread their wares over the floor of your vestibule — brass bowls, brass-
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bound boxes, boxes of black lacquer inlaid with mother-of-pearl, strings of amber beads — squatting beside them without a word, waiting until some one comes to examine them. They will wait a whole morning, and even then perhaps no purchaser appears. Or if you take pity on the poor man and look over his stock he makes little effort to sell. He doesn’t belaud his wares. He suggests no imaginary needs, indi- cates nothing for your inspection. And con- vinced at long last that there is to be no trade he packs up in leisurely apathy and moves on to the next house. But it doesn’t seem to matter.
For ordinary purposes you patronize the Japanese shops in the Hon Machi. There is a sort of Woolworth’s there, known as the H Store, and a sort of Selfridge’s, Mitsukoshi. It was at the H store that my wife was once greeted by an affable assistant with the perplexing formula, “ Good morning. How are you ? I am sorry for you.” But after this his English failed. There is also a Beauty Shop which, wise in foreign taste, sets little, nude images in the window, which the natives find sniggeringly intriguing ; and a music shop which advertises “ orugans ” and “ gmramohons,” usually crowded about the doorway with kimonoed figures intent on a stridency of radio music broadcast from the
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local J.O.D.K. (J6ee Awww Deee K6ee). The silk stores are always picturesque with a display of materials in intricate, bright, flowered designs. When the Girls’ Festival draws round in May there are innumerable windows set with dolls arrayed in meticulous imitation of the old Japanese Court dresses ; miracles of delicate craftsmanship. And always at any festival season there are displays of flower arrangement. But Keijo is not Peking ; it is not even Tokyo. There is little to buy.
At Christmas, however, you may win a prize. I know a lady who won a prize. For every yen’s worth of goods that you buy you receive a ticket. You take your ticket to a stall, where there are all sorts of attractive articles on view, and having surrendered your ticket you plunge your hand into a box and withdraw a lottery number. For this you usually receive a packet of caramels. I have received dozens of packets of caramels. But I know a lady who won a first prize. The prize was worth four pounds. But it was wasted on her. For she was a very prim missionary spinster, and the prize was a barrel of Japanese wine.
She said she didn’t drink wine, and asked if she might have the equivalent in goods. But that was quite impossible. It was against police
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regulations, which stated that a prize-winner must receive his prize.
Which puts me in mind of another story of police regulations, not entirely irrelevant, because connected with this same street. It is a long, narrow street, gay with lanterns, with artificial cherry-blossom in spring and maple-leaf in autumn, and its hard surface perpetually ringing with the “ crank-cronk ” of Japanese clogs. Bicycles used to be a danger before they were prohibited, and rickshas are still an annoyance. Once cars were permitted, but they have been forbidden now for some time. When that regulation was first made, a foreigner, unaware of it, drove into the street, but was of course stopped by a policeman. Being informed of the new regulation he backed out. But the policeman had not finished with him.
“ That is a fine of four yen,” he said.
Without protest the foreigner paid the four yen. But even so the policeman had not finished.
“ For you,” he said, “ it will be eight yen ; for not only did you drive in, but you also drove out.”
I should like to tell you, too, of the Severance Hospital Drug Store. Though this belongs to the Severance Hospital — a large missionary hospital — ^it is under Korean management. The manager, trained abroad, once complained to
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my wife, who was buying some Lux, that un- fortunately he could not charge her so much now as he used to do because, as the Japamesc stores had also taken to selling Lux, he could no longer fix his own price, in fact he had had to reduce his price from thirty-five sen to twenty-eight. He spoke pathetically, and expected my wife to sympathize. Once, too, I went to this same store to buy some disinfectant.. My wee son was unwell, and as my wife and I were obliged to share a room with him we thought it advisable to spray the air. I explained my needs to the assistant. He vanished for consultation with the manager, and reappeared some fifteen minutes later with some Flit.
“ This will kill flies,” I said, “ but will it kiU germs ? ”
He didn’t know, so vanished for a second consultation, and returned to say that he was very sorry but it wouldn’t kill germs.
“ Then it’s no good for my purpose,” I said.
“ No good,” he agreed.
" Well, then,” I told him, “ let me have some- thing that voill kill germs.”
He vanished a third time. He was away at least half an hour. But this time he seemed to have been successful. He presented me with a bottle of liquid.
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“ This will kill germs,” he declared.
“What is it?” I asked.
“ I think, formaldehyde,” he answered.
I might have taken it in my ignorance, but I happened to have memories of formaldehyde, memories of the spraying of billets during the war. My particular memory was that for two hours after the spraying no one could enter the billets, and even after two hours it was distressing for the nose and eyes. I expressed my doubts to the assistant.
“ Can I use this while the patient is in the room ? ” I asked. This occasioned a fourth disappearance. He returned for the last time.
" Very sorry,” he said. “ This will kill germs, but it will also kill the patient.”
There were occasions when tourists came to visit Keijo. They came in a sudden swarm, and the next day had vanished. Usually they came in a ship named the “ Resolute.” On one such occasion one of the Severance doctors suggested to the manager of the drug store that he might make a special display to attract the patronage of the “ Resolute ” tourists. When the ship arrived the doctor discovered a couple of ladies of his acquaintance, and naturally enough escorted them over the hospital, com- pleting the inspection with a visit to the drug
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itore. Expecting an imposing display, he was prepared to usher the ladies in with a certain aiumphant flourish. But facing him on the front door he saw an enormous placard :
WELCOME
TO THE
RESOLUTE
WE SELL
KOTEX
XI
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1HAVE referred to myself both as a teacher at a school and a professor at a university. I was both, because my school was the Preparatory School of the Keijo Imperial Uni- versity, and the teachers there were entitled to style themselves professors. This does not mean that I held a chair, nor even that I lectured on English Literature. The school was of high- school standard merely — though the boys were mosdy in their twenties and many of them were married — and I was occupied quite humbly in teaching English conversation and composition. I say “ teaching ” to indicate an aim rather than an achievement, because whenever I was asked — chiefly by zealous American missionary educators — ^what I taught my students, my unvarying, and entirely truthful, reply was “ Nothing.” This always caused consternation. It checked the mirth of innocently festive reunions in Japanese restaurants and shocked into silence whole dinner tables. I suppose there was a
lad
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suggestion in it of an attitude fls^antly un- principled. Until I explained. The boys came to me with anything from five to ten years of English study behind them, but under the Japanese. To build on this foundation would have been like building on a ditchful of loose rubble. Their pronunciation was so original that to make me understand they were obliged to repeat their remarks to me two or three times and word by word, even letter by letter ; and my pronunciation seemed to them so ludicrous that it sent them into violent fits of laughter. So it took us quite a long time to adjust ourselves to each other, on a basb of mutual forbearance. There was no unpleasantness. The students were very considerate. After all, coming from the other side of the world it was natural that 1 should have picked up some curious habits of speech. And we drifted finally into the tacit agreement that I might pronounce in my own insular way, provided I did not insist on their imitating me. But it was all very jolly, because when the fog of dullness was settling over a lesson I would fix on something a student had said, and say, “ Now in England we would pronounce it like this ’* ; and the gush of unin- telligible noises that I emitted would dissipate the dullness on a roar of delight.
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It was from a sense of duty rather than with any anticipation of pleasure that I visited other schools. Indeed, I found it was part of my normal programme for which I was made a generous travelling allowance by the authorities. It is the Japanese practice, which might well be adopted in England, to send their teachers frequently on visiting tours to schools both in their own and in foreign countries. I also was sent on such a tour ; but that was in Japan proper, not in Korea. But quite on my own I looked up a school or two in the capital, both Japanese and American. At the Normal School, where boys were being trained as teachers, I listened to an English lady teaching English to a class of young children. This was an exjjeri- ment. The Japanese refuse to be convinced that the English teacher can do more effective work in the early than in the later stages of the language. At present teachers are engaged from England, on extremely generous salaries, for the High Schools and the Universities only ; with the result that I have mentioned. However, here was a definite experiment. The Principal of the school, a very fat man of frog-like dignity, who awed me into speechless insignificance, seemed fond of experiments. There were no punishments at his school, he told me. That
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might very well be, I thought, since a visit to his study should be sufficient to intimidate the most obstreperous ; but he added that of course it was necessary occasionally to expel a boy from the school. However, apart from that single trifling resource, which would merely ruin the culprit’s career, there were no punishments. And here was another experiment, allowing English to be taught to children by an English teacher. His somewhat condescending manner suggested that of course the experiment would be a failure, but it was worth making merely to establish that. But if I know the English lady in question, and I know her pretty well, the experiment will not be a failure. She is very persevering, and holds her opinions with an unshadcable fortitude. I argued with her for a long time on the pronunciation of “ Saturday.” She maintained that the Japanese and Koreans should be taught to pronounce it “ Sat-ur-day.” I maintained that no Englishman ever said “ Sat-ur-day,” but “ Sdturdy,” that it was to be found so, though in phonetic symbols, in standard dictionaries of pronimciation, that in fact she was falling into the same error as the Japanese, who base their teaching on the theory of an obsolete orthography instead of on the practice of living people. I was very logical,
K
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and expressed myself well. But, you know, I couldn’t convince her. Still, we only argued, we didn’t quarrel. It wouldn’t have been safe, as at that moment I was balancing a teacup on one knee and a plate piled with cake and sand- wiches on the other. And to prove that we didn’t quarrel I was invited to lunch. “ When shall I come ? ” I asked.
“ Why, let me see,” the lady replied, " do you think you could manage Sdturdy ? ”
Once, quite by accident, I visited another school. At least, it was hardly a visit as I merely looked in through a window. It was during a walk in the country. Passing through a village of some twenty hovels I heard a persistent and resolute shouting. The effect was something of what might be expected if half a dozen claiionetists, with their instruments all in dis- accord, selected each a different note and main- tained it in strenuous rivalry against the rest. Looking through the window of the particular hovel from which this clamour emanated, I saw six little boys squatting on the floor, each with a book before him inscribed with large Chinese characters, each crying out the characters at the full strength of his lungs. They sat in two rows facing each other, but judging by the concentrated anguish of their faces they were
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entirely oblivious of their fellows. Entirely oblivious of me too, in spite of my foreign face framed so unexpectedly in the tiny window. But perhaps not so oblivious of their master, a bearded Korean dressed in the native white robe with little horsehair hat complete, who sat to one end surveying them with grave severity. So, I thought, turning away, in spite of our fine new education the old learning still persists. And at the back of my mind I always have that picture. It mingles with the memory of Yu See Kuk in our imi at Kyung Ju rhapsodizing in broken English on the beauty of the Chinese Classics, and complaining that, being obliged to study them in the Japanese version, the beauty was outraged, whereas studied in the Korean . . . But 1 know nothing of that. But what 1 do know is that the Chinese Classics still hold their place. They are the Virgil and the Homer of the East, the Lucretius and the Plato. Their acquisition is a gentlemanly accomplishment, exactly like the acquisition of Latin and Greek in the West Exactly, because their purpose seems to be to confer the distinction of inutility on a man and to furnish him with apt quotations completely divorced from reality, just as “ Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ” is heard frequently in the lecture-hall but never on the battlefield. But
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the peculiar thing is this : Latin and Greek do provide a harmonious background for Western education, but the Chinese Classics do not. Yet they are still an essential part of the curri- culum. Perhaps there is a hint of an explanation of the failure of Western education in the East. Because it is a failure.
Yet there is no lack of method. The Japanese schools, in Korea as well as in Japan proper, are divided into Primary, Middle and High, leading to the University. At present there is only one imiversity in Korea, for men, not women. The schools are practically free, even to the University — at my own school I was told the students’ fees just covered the coal bill — and attendance will be compulsory up to Middle School standard as soon as sufficient schools have been provided. At the junior schools the teaching is done in Japanese, except in the so-called Common Schools which are attended by the Korean children who cannot yet speak Japanese. At the High Schools and University entrance is by competitive examination. And these, you will be surprised to read, are only open to those “ who speak the national language.” But then, the ** national language ” of Korea is Japanese 1 However, the distinction is one of ability, not as in England one of class and wealth. Which, of
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course, is to the good. There are also commercial schools and agricultural schools and industrial schools and medical schools, the Government hospital in the capital being incorporated in the University. The teachers are trained in special institutions, and the High School teachers are nearly all sent abroad ; to England for language, to Germany for medicine, to France for law. But as it is almost impossible for a Korean to become a High School teacher, this privilege is practically monopolized by the Japanese. The buildings are extremely up-to-date, even if hideous, and excellently equipped. Indeed, one wonders how such an enormous structure of free education is financed. Especially when one reckons up the number of the staff and servants. A school of three or four himdred pupils will have some half-dozen clerks in the office, perhaps two messengers, a boy in permanent attendance in the staff room, odd men and women for cooking and charring, a chauffeur for the school car, possibly a librarian. And at a university dinner which I attended — there are some seven hundred students in the University — I counted four hundred professors. Remember, too, that in Korea a teacher receives forty per cent, above his Japanese salary to compensate him for being in exile, and is retired on a pension, if he wishes.
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at the end of ten years. Still, there it is, a highly efficient organization, and clearly not cramped for funds.
It is, as you have probably gathered. State controlled. The control is ultra-Prussian in its completeness, and is outwardly expressed by the uniform worn during a boy’s entire school and university career. Indeed, Japanese education is a tool in the hands of the Government. The aim is to shape the nation on a definite plan for a definite purpose. I remember one day sitting next to Pal Sung Yi in a tram, compressed together by the crowded students on their way to school. 1 had an attach6-case on my knees, with a book open on the case. 1 was attempting to read, in fact I was succeeding, because long habit had inured me to the conditions of the Korean tram. To be precise, I was reading “ La Vie de Jeanne D’Arc,” which would be absorbing in any circumstances. But Pal Sung Yi interrupted me. He also had a book, 1 noticed. He was studying the history of England, he told me, about William the Conqueror, the Battle of Hastings. The peculiar smile on his softly pouting lips expressed an ironical bewilder- ment. 1 knew a question was to come. The burden of it was, why do the English allow the story of Hastings to be recorded in their histories ?
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I had been so lost in the trial of Jeanne that 1 did not immediately see the point of the question.
“ Why,” I said, “ it happened.”
Pal Sung Yi’s reply made that crowded and jolting tram for me the scene of an unforgettable illumination.
“ But it was so shameful,” he said.
One was left to surmise that the Japanese history was taught on the principle that shameful things must be repressed, that nothing must be admitted which did not redound to the national glory. Distorted in this way, history may be an effective vehicle for Government propaganda. As in the East it is.
When I visited the American mission school 1 found the Principal disturbed by the problem of registration. 1 was to find other missionary educators disturbed by the same problem. If a school remained unregistered it would lose all standing, and the pupils would leave, knowing quite well that as old scholars of such a school they would stand no chance of an official post. But to register, quite apart from being open to continual inspection and being obliged to comply with an abimdance of petty regulations, meant that the Government syllabus must be followed, that equipment must be kept to standard — ^at the Mission expense — that a certain proportion
136 KOREA OF THE JAPANESE
of the teachers must be Japanese, including the teachers of history and ethics, that religious instruction must not be compulsory, and must not be given at all during school hours. It was very awkward. It meant that America would be sending money to Korea to help foot the bill of Japanese State education, which is directly opposed both in method and principle to the education of America. Yet most of the mission schools have registered, though I can’t for the life of me see why they don’t close down.
But that’s how it is.
Yet beneath the crust of this efficient organiza- tion and deliberate control there is an essential rottermess. The science students, for instance, learn Latin, the University prospectus will tell you. I used to teach that Latin. The students came to me one hour a week for one year. Say thirty-five periods in all. And I taught in English, of course, which they could barely understand. French is taught to the law students — I know the teacher — ^in something the same way. The students are examined terminally. But I was told, when I handed in my first term’s results, that the marks were too low. Next term, please, would I make them higher. I made them higher, and all was well. I came to see that my standard must be not from nought to a hundred.
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with the century a dim ideal, but from forty to a hundred, with the century a frequent realization. Yet all those terminal papers are fastened in bundles and signed and labelled and kept for reference in the school archives.
That is one side.
The other is more serious still. The very people whom the State is so anxious to mould into compliance, or rather to forge into a national weapon, are the ones who most readily rebel. I don’t refer merely to the school strikes, though these may be important enough to involve the military. The real bogy of Japan is communism, known as “ daingerous thought,” and the most fertile field for communism is the students. As Primary and Middle School boys they believe zealously enough that the first Japanese Emperor descended from heaven seven hundred years before Christ, they believe in the divinity of the reigning Emperor and would religiously sacrifice their lives for his sake ; but in the High School and the University they learn of the Old Stone Man and they study biology and evolution, and faith yields to doubt, and doubt becomes definite denial. Their carefully expurgated history cannot stand the test of scientific investigation ; their ancient ethic of obedience to one’s parents, to one’s ancestors, or complete subservience to the
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throne, is shaken by the study of Western literature, which reveals to them a more human and a more liberal code. Add to this, that the Easterner’s conception of learning is a means to obtaining official appointments, but that with education becoming universal, as it already is in Japan, as it soon will be in Korea, there are not nearly enough appointments, official or other- wise, to go round, and you can see that the High Schools and the Universities are aggravating the problem of unemployment ; aggravating it in a particularly insidious way by loosing upon a simple and primitive people an increasing band of conceited young men, talented in their own manner, with a prestige of learning, naturally fluent and forceful in speech, and hankering for an upheaval in the expectation of plunder in the form of lucrative offices in the new State that is to be. This has already brought disaster to China. It is a menace in Japan and Korea. Can one be surprised that the police are instructed to arrest at sight anyone suspected of “ dangerous thought ” ?
It is aU very sad, because the intention behind it is so excellent. To create a nation of enlightened fanatics is a conception both original and sublime. Merely it has the trifling drawback
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of being impossible. But, after all, Korea is a country of farmers. Why bother them with our Western learning, so fruitful of unsettlement, so ill-adapted to their needs ? It might even be better to return to that little village school with the half-dozen scholars crying out their characters at the full stretch of their lungs beneath the vigilant, grave eyes of their master.
But of course you will tell me that one can’t put the clock back. Possibly not ; but I should like to know for which hour the alarm is set.
XII
THE CASE OF MARY PAK
Her name wasn’t Mary Pak at all, but decency demands a certain disguise. However, her first name was Western, and Mary may very well stand for it. Her family name was, of course, Korean. For some months she was a fellow lodger of mine. We talked fi’equendy together, having common interests but divergent opinions. Which makes for con- versation more abundantly than agreement.
She was so vital a personality that it seems unfair to make of her a “ case.” Yet she was a case. Expressed at its simplest her case was this : educated in America from the age of seven she returned to Korea at twenty-one, both in manner and at heart an alien, yet was expected by her people to resume her place in the family exactly like a Korean woman. This would have been difficult enough as a mere change of habits ; for instance, long skirts, a strange diet, sitting and sleepily; on the floor. But it demanded more than this ; it demanded a change of psychology*
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which was impossible. The girl didn’t know two words of her native tongue. When she visited her people they conversed in English. This was a barrier in itself. Surmountable, of course, if considered simply as a question of language. But it was a question of adjustment to life, of back- ground, of equipment, of attitude. Her outlook was that of an American girl.
Then there were other complications. She had been taken to America by missionaries — to be exact, by my hosts, which accounts for our lodging in the same household. Yet she was outspokenly hostile to missions. If she had been politic enough to conceal her hostility many excellent appointments would have offered them- selves for her selection. But she refused to bow her head in the House of Rimmon. Which further incensed her people, staunchly Christian. Her father, one of the wealthiest men in Korea, and probably quite the cleverest, stopped all supplies, leaving the girl the alternatives of returning to home duties, living on charity, or cutting herself adrift from family and friends and making such way for herself as she could. The last, you must understand, no easy matter for an Eastern woman. Yet it was eventually this course that she chose.
How we first came to cross swords I can’t quite
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remember. What I do remember is that I found myself committed to a most astonishing attitude. I became an ardent champion of imperialism, of strong and ruthless Government, of “ the white man’s burden,” of the duty of the powerful to rule the weak for their own good. I was driven into this position as into the last stronghold of an invaded land by Mary Pak’s pugnacious advocacy of Freedom. By which she meant the right of the individual to follow his particular crazes in utter disregard of the opinion of his fellows, the demands of custom, the good of his country, or the uplift of the world.
“ What do you mean,” she asked me, “ by the uplift of the world ? ”
Well, after all, what did I mean ? The words sounded simple enough, but they defied me to expound them. And she found it quite easy — I should have found it quite easy myself— to dismiss my specific examples of uplift as mere tinkerings and patchings of doubtful benefit if not of definite harm. It was intolerable to be obliged to defend myself against the very cynicisms which 1 delighted in pitting against others. But it was an amusing exercise in dialectics, and I came to enjoy it.
The burden of her complaint was that life demanded liberty, but that custom enclosed the
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individual within limiting prohibitions. She was responsible to herself, wasn’t she? Then why shouldn’t she satisfy her tastes, her impulses, her needs ? Of course I entirely sympathized with her. If she had been more beautiful she might have been a dangerous opponent. But her rather screwed-up face and shrill voice fortified a man’s resistance. I was cruel enough to tell her to satisfy her needs and see what came of it. She grew angry, which made her less attractive than ever. Couldn’t I see ? That was just the point. The world had conspired against the individual. And I was part of the world. I was too timid to rebel. Which was probably quite true. But I gave such fiice of wisdom as I could to my timidity.
“ You must remember,” I said, " that the test of conduct is not its application to one but its application to all,” which, though I hated the priggishness of it, was also quite true.
But I could understand well enough her fierce individualism. She was cut off from her country- men by her Western upbringing, and from her Western upbringing by her Eastern blood. Moreover, she was a woman. For a man with her training, and incidentally with her brains, life would have been easy. Whatever career he had chosen, he would have possessed an enormous
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advantage over his fellows. And marriage would have offered no difficulty, the Easterner, however westernized, requiring little more than a woman in the background to order his house and provide him with sons. But for Mary Pak marriage to a Korean was unthinkable, to a foreigner impossible. Which drove her to the emphatic declaration, unnecessarily repetitive, that marriage was slavery. She would never marry ; she needed to be free. She was forced to her individualistic creed ; she was so absolutely alone.
It was more to the point when the debate turned on Korea.
Here I had an unexpected ally, as my brother came over from China, his mind somewhat bitterly occupied with the disastrous results there of the gospel of liberty and the subversion of government. It was natural that Mary Pak should see in her people a magnified example of her own case. The Japanese imposed their laws on the Koreans without the Koreans’ consent. Her country was justified in its resentment, would be justified, if it had the power, in resistance. Indeed, the girl manifested sufficient “ dangerous thought ” to lodge her in jail, I should imagine, for the rest of her life. At this time I knew little enough of the benefits of the Japanese Irule, and
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wasn’t qualified to reply, but my brother could quote China. Liberty under the Chinese nationalists meant liberty for the idle to rob the industrious, for the strong to rob the weak. It was simply that the Government had been removed and bandits sprang up like weeds. But then, Mary Pak countered, shrilly ironical, we were English ; of course we defended the Japanese, because we were doing exactly the same in India as the Japanese were doing in Korea. But what right had we in India ? What right had we to impose our regulations on the Indians against their will ? We had made them a nation of slaves.
“ Certainly,” my brother said, “ we don’t let them burn their widows.”
Of course the debates — they were innumerable, blazing up at the least provocation — resulted in no conclusion. But they clarified for me the tangled problem of dominance and subserviency. Not that they solved the problem — ^I don’t believe that there is a solution — but they estab- lished certain abstract and universal principles on which any theory of Government must be based. Principles which are commonplaces in the West, but not in the East. As, for instance, that without order there can be no liberty ; that liberty is not the birth of a moment, but of the
L
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labour of generations. Commonplaces, I repeat ; yet to the Korean mind paradoxes and contra- dictions. Even to Mary Pak ; intellectually of the West, but emotionally of the East. To her, liberty and order (which she called restriction) were fundamentally opposed ; and being a gift of nature, like the sun and the open air, liberty needed no cultivation, no preparation. Simply one behaved as one pleased, and one was firee. And perhaps it is that spirit, rather than national resentment, that is thwarting the work of the Japanese Government in Korea.
One admits the red tape, of course. One admits the petty officiousness, even the favouritism and the injustice. But the fact remains that Japan found Korea in a state of apathetic exhaustion due partly at least, and many will declare entirely, to the misrule of the native Korean Court, and from this apathetic exhaustion Japan is striving, with all her resources of ingenuity and power, to lift the country to the level of a modern nation. She has created roads, railways, postal and telegraph services, universal electric lighting, sanitation. Whether these things are benefits or not, they are now there. She has distributed wholesale, and free, the best breeds of fowls, so that the Korean egg is no longer a meagre thing hardly worth the shelling
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for the meat within, but has both quality and size. She has planted fruit-trees on the hill-sides where rice cannot grow. She has set aside spaces for experimental farms. She has irrigated waste land, is rapidly damming the rivers and building cisterns to obviate both flood and drought. She is afforesting the hills, which, left to themselves, the Koreans completely denuded except in the grounds of palaces and temples and royal tombs. But all the Korean sees is that whereas water was free he must now pay three yen (six shillings) a year, and that he may only chop such wood for his house and his Are as the authorities permit. And it is useless to tell him that for six shillings a year he has perhaps a doubled rice-crop, and is completely relieved of the menace of famine ; and that, although wood-cutting is restricted, at least he has wood to cut, whereas before he had nothing but the yearly shrub that sprouted on the mountains.
Well, what can you do with such a people? One can sympathize with the Japanese irritation ; indeed, one wonders why they do not retire and leave the Koreans to themselves. The obvious answer to that is that Korea is strategically necessary and commercially profitable. But there is another answer, a more fundamental one ; the answer which Japan, sincerely or not.
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prefers to make. The answer, indeed, which the British make when questioned concerning India. Left to themselves the Koreans would rot, which would affect not Korea alone but the whole world. Not that Korea is very vast or very vital. To allow India to rot, for instance, would be a much more serious proposition. But the principle is the same. Eventually all policy must become, as it is becoming, world-wide. No nation, however insignificant, however mean its contribution to mankind, can be allowed to fall into neglect and decay. And this is the essential justification of the Japanese rule in Korea.
Whether Japan has set herself as a remote aim the training of Korea for self-government I don’t know. If she has, she is very optimistic. The Koreans are a delightful people, extremely approachable and full of laughter, but they show not the least aptitude for organized control. They show, indeed, a positive aversion to it, undermining whoever may be in power, whether he be a State official or the pastor of a church, enduring no one to be set over them — ^in spite of their nationalist gesturing — ^unless he be a foreigner. And this attitude is not only a negative legacy firom centuries of misrule. Chronic bad government is not an inevitable
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misfortune like a chronic drought. A corrupt and tyrannous Court persisting from generation to generation is a sure sign of national debility. If a people continues to be badly governed it is because they have it in them to be badly governed. Actively or passively they must be held responsible, and not weakly pitied as innocent victims of an evil beyond their power. And the Koreans are such a people. One is tempted to couple with them the Chinese, possibly the Russians, and to formulate a theory that certain races, like certain individuals, are lacking simply in the qualities necessary for rule, just as certain countries may be lacking in the qualities necessary for industry. And in either case such a lack can be made good from outside. Brains for organization can be im- ported like coal and steel. And not merely brains for organization, but that peculiar gift for judicial rectitude and political honesty which is the portion in some measure of all the Western nations, but in the East of the Japanese alone.
Yet it might be difficult to persuade the Koreans to regard the Japanese merely as a particular kind of import necessary to make good a chance national deficiency. It would be difficult even if you changed the figure, and
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suggested that Korea was the employer and Japan the employee, a business manager, as it were, for the landed gentleman living at ease on his estate. And the Japanese might not like it either. Yet for the life of me I can’t see that imperialism means anything other than that.
We seem to have wandered from Mary Pak. Her father held a high position under the Korean Emperor, but, although invited to serve in the Japanese Government, he refused all office. The missionaries declared that this was interpreted as an insult, and that later, when he was thrown into prison for three years in connection with some plot against the Governor, it was simply the Japanese taking a deliberate and spiteful revenge. Possibly ; possibly not. At any rate my hostess used to tell me of her visits to the dear man in prison, enlarging indignantly on his hardships, clothed as he was summer and winter in a single thickness of cotton, kept in an unheated cell, and submitted to a daily baptism of cold water. But even in prison he contrived to keep a shrewd eye on the matrimonial affairs of his family, and did not lose the art of playing the Eastern despot over his daughter. Yet he was an amusing old man, entertaining the missionaries with stories about the Japanese. He was just that
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cute.” But as far as I could make out he lived on the labour of his tenant farmers like any other landlord, extorting annually his full fifty per cent, of the produce.
As for Mary, she had many talents. She was also “just that cute,” though where she got “ such notions ” from, my hostess even, who knew her from childhood, couldn’t imagine. She had made a brilliant college career. She was an admirable debater. She could write choice English. She could play the violin. Her teacher, a Czecho-Slovakian and a very excellent friend of mine, told me that she had “ so goot feeling for the museek and play so naice ” but only “ she vill not practees.” But I never heard her perform. She seemed to me to prefer gramo- phone records of the eukalele and the saxophone. But she had one unique qualification. She was a graphologist. She was insatiable in her demands for hand-writing to be analysed, and her analyses were astonishing. I forget most of what she revealed to me about my own character, but I remember I was logical and sensitive. So sensitive ! So sensitive ! She gave me to believe that she had never met any one else quite so superlatively sensitive. I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or rebuked. But, being logical, she couldn’t understand my obtuseness in not
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seeing through the pretences of convention ; and, being sensitive, she couldn’t understand my passive acceptance of its tyranny. I was born to be a rebel, but I was a slave.
Yes, in her presence I was a slave. Possibly because I rebelled against her rebellion. Yet away from her I found myself mocking in a manner humiliatingly reminiscent of her own. But with this difference : that being detached from her peculiar perplexities my logic obliged me to include her in