Where Half The World Is Waking Up Part 5

When at last the world has grown old and nations and empires not yet formed shall themselves have gone the mortal way common alike to human creatures and human creations, I think the far historian will record few events either more dramatic or more pregnant with undreamed-of meaning than Perry's entrance into j.a.panese waters just five years after the discovery of gold in California had ended the world-old drama of our westward march.

So to-day, as I have said, the full tides of Orient and Occident have rushed together in j.a.pan, and it is not merely a land of curious customs and strange phenomena, but a land in which the contrasts exist side by side, and most interesting of all, a land of strangely mingling social and industrial currents. East and West have met, and we wait to see what forces in each shall prevail when the shock of their fierce encounter shall have pa.s.sed. For it is not merely j.a.pan, but all Asia, whose future may be affected by the outcome of the new, tense struggle here between the ideals of West and East.

As on the streets of Tokyo and Yokahoma the j.a.panese {59} in European dress jostles his brother in native garb, as streams of men in coats and trousers and shoes mingle with men wearing kimonas, hikamas, and getas, so in the minds of the people the teachings of modern science and Confucian cla.s.sic meet; the faith of the Christian grapples with the faith of the Buddhist; the masterful aspirations of Western civilization surge against the old placidity of the East.

What shall be the outcome? Upon nothing else, it seems to me, depends so much as upon the religious foundation upon which j.a.pan seeks to build the structure of her newer and richer life. Many of her people, if I may change the figure, are seeking to put the new wine of Christian civilization into the old bottles of Shinto and Buddhist ritualism. That this must fail is, I think, self-evident. Many others, like the iconoclasts of the French Revolution, would sweep away all religion, but they will find that they are fighting against an ineradicable instinct of human nature, the innate craving of the divine in man.

In my own brief stay in j.a.pan I have seen enough to convince me of the truth of both the foregoing observations. I confess that I came to the country with a distinct doubt as to the wisdom of stressing mission work here--came thinking the field less promising then elsewhere. But I go away with no such feeling. What I have seen and heard has dispelled my doubts. Speaking simply as a journalist and a student of social and industrial conditions, I believe that to-day j.a.pan needs nothing more than Christian missionaries--men who are willing to forget dogma and tradition and creedal differences in emphasizing the fundamental teachings of Christ Himself, and who have education, sympathy, and vision to fit them for the stupendous task of helping mold a new and composite type of human civilization, a type which may ultimately make conquest of the whole Oriental half of our human race.

Kobe, j.a.pan.

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VII

KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM"

I have become a contemporary of David and the patriarchs of Israel. In the civilization into which I have come science and invention are in swaddling clothes, the Pyramids are yet young, the great nations of Western Europe still in the womb of Time.

This at least is how I have felt now that, having left j.a.pan, I am travelling through Korea, "the Land of the Morning Calm"--or "Chosen,"

as the j.a.panese will call it hereafter--whose authentic recorded history runs back into the twelfth century before the Christian era, and whose general features must have changed but little in all this time. A typical Korean view of the present year might well be photographed to ill.u.s.trate a Sunday-school lesson from the Old Testament.

The men in the fields I have seen plow with bullocks harnessed in the primitive fashion of the earliest civilization. Their plow stocks are of wood rough-hewn from their native forest trees, the plowman here never standing between the "plow-handles," as we say, because there is only one handle and that little better than a stick of firewood. With sickles equally primitive I have seen men cutting the ripe rice in the fields; with flails, beating out their grain. Their houses, hardly high enough to stand up in, are little more than four square rock walls with roofs of straw, over which pumpkin vines clamber or on which immense quant.i.ties of red pepper are drying in the autumn sun.

Nor would the dress of the people--everybody {61} in white (or what was once white) garments--have seemed strange in ancient Judea.

There is also the same mixture of plains and peaks as Bible pictures of the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night, as October's hunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint light gleaming here and there from an opening in the rock huts, and with Arcturus and the Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has seemed almost sacrilege to mar the ancient environment by such an anachronism as a modern railway locomotive. Rather, in looking out over the picturesque mountains and valleys and sniffing the cool, dry air, you feel "the call of the wild" in your blood. Across long centuries the life of your far-gone nomadic ancestors calls to you. Almost irresistibly you are moved to take a human friend and a friendly horse or pony and pitch your camp out under the great stars--larger and brighter indeed do they seem to burn here in the Orient--and feel the dew on your face as you awaken in the "morning calm" of the ancient Hermit Kingdom, whose feeble life was snuffed out, like the flame of a burnt-down candle, but a few short months ago.

As I came into Seoul three nights ago I found it hardly less fascinating than the country through which I had travelled during the day. Through ancient streets, unlit by any electric glare, strangely robed, almost spirit-like white figures were gliding here and there in the moonlight, singly or in groups, and but a few minutes' ride in our rickshaws brought us to the old South Gate. Great monument of a dead era is it, relic of the days when Seoul trusted to its ten miles of ma.s.sive stone walls (already a century old when Columbus set sail from Palos) to keep out the war-like Mongol and Tartar.

In j.a.pan I found a different world from that which I had known, but a world in which East and West were strangely mingled: much of the familiar with the unfamiliar. Here in Korea, on the contrary, I have found the real East, the Asia of romance, of tradition and of fable, almost untouched by {62} Western influences--dirty, squalid, unprogressive, and yet with a fascination all its own. Great bare mountains look down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing their steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacent valley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but little higher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a towering skysc.r.a.per effect is produced by a photographer's little two-story studio building on the main street of the city. Practically every other building is but little higher and not greatly larger as a rule, than the pens in which our American farmers fatten hogs in the fall.

Most American merchants would expect to make more in a day than the average white-robed, easy-going Seoul merchant has in stock, but he smokes his long-stemmed pipe in peaceful contemplation of the world and doesn't worry. There are no sidewalks in Seoul, of course, although it has been for five centuries (until now) the capital of a kingdom, and a quarter of a million people call the city their home; no carriages or buggies, no sewerage, and but few horses. There are miserable little overloaded ponies that the average farmer would feel that he could pitch single-handed into his barn-loft, but the burden-carriers are mostly bulls that are really magnificent in appearance, both oxen and ponies carrying loads on their backs that an American would expect to crush them.

The customs are odd indeed. Men wear enormous straw hats as a badge of mourning, but the usual style of head-dress is to shave the extreme summit of the head, while the rest of the hair grows long and is braided up in a sort of topknot with a little bird-cage hat above it.

This hat is then tied under the chin as an American woman would tie hers.

Girls are but little seen on the streets, custom requiring them to stay indoors before marriage, and the married women, when on the street are likely to wear a sort of green wrap thrown over their heads and shoulders that leaves only their eyes and contiguous facial territory exposed. The tourist is at first {63} inclined to think that there are many young girls on the streets, but this is because the boys dress as we have grown used to seeing girls dress in America.

Take the young boy who waits on my table: fair of feature in his neat white dress, and with a long glossy hair-plait hanging down his back, you would think him some fair Korean maiden. When he gets married a little later, probably at seventeen or eighteen, he will shave his head (not necessarily as a sign of mourning!) and wear his hair thereafter in the manner described in the preceding paragraph. An English missionary-doctor's pretty daughter here yesterday (and how pretty an English or American girl does look in this far land!) told me that a Korean girl of twenty or twenty-one is regarded as a rather desperate old maid, and the go-betweens, who arrange the marriages here as they do in j.a.pan, are likely to charge a rather steep sum for getting a husband for one so far advanced in spinsterhood! The chances are that the groom doesn't see his bride until the ceremony, and she doesn't even see him then, for according to the curious custom here the bride's eyes are sealed up until late afternoon of her wedding day. More than this, custom requires that the bride must keep absolutely unbroken silence all the day long, and for a varying length of time thereafter. Mrs. Bishop in her book on Korea a.s.serts that "it may be a week or several months before the husband knows the sound of his wife's voice,"--and the nature of the dear creatures in America will of course insure the ready acceptance of her statement!

The go-betweens are often not very scrupulous, and for good fees sometimes manage to palm off damsels of unsatisfactory features on unsuspecting swains, or match undesirable young fellows with girls vastly superior to them. A rather amusing instance was reported to me by the young lady from whom I have just quoted. One of the officials or n.o.blemen in Seoul had a daughter whom the go-between was preparing to marry off into a family of rank in another city. A few days before the wedding-day-set-to-be, some one came to {64} the father of the bride and said: "Did you know that your prospective son-in-law has a hare-lip?" Now a hare-lip in Korea is not merely such an undesirable addition to one's countenance as to make a Mrs. Wiggs happy because of being without it, but under the old dispensation no one with a harelip, or other like facial blemish, could be presented at court and thereby introduced into the Four Hundred of this capital city.

Therefore the father waxed thoughtful from his topknot to the end of his long-stem pipe. "I tell you what I'll do," he finally said to his wife. "We'll go ahead with the ceremony, but instead of my daughter I'll subst.i.tute my orphan niece." And he did, and the young fellow didn't know any better for a week.

Fortunately, however, my story doesn't end here. I am extremely glad to add the usual "lived-happily-ever-after" peroration, for that was really what happened in this case. The father of my young lady informant, who is a doctor, sewed up the young fellow's lip, he was presented at court, and the real daughter who so narrowly escaped marrying may be an old maid, for all I know.

In such a high, dry climate as this one would expect to find little tuberculosis, but I am told that there is really a great deal of it, due to the carelessness of the families where there are victims, and to the generally unsanitary conditions. A daughter of one of the Southern missionaries here, having contracted the malady, has just gone to Arizona in search of cure. Everywhere on the streets I encounter faces marked by smallpox, and formerly to have had the disease was the rule rather than the exception. In fact, instead of alluding to a man's inexperience by saying "He hasn't cut his eye teeth," as we do, a Korean would say: "He hasn't had smallpox." Since vaccination became the rule, however, there are very few cases.

Infant mortality here, as in America, is one of the greatest factors in the high death-rate, but conditions are improving. {65} And so long as authorities declare that in America half the infant death-rate is due to ignorance or neglect, we haven't much right to point a scornful finger at Korea, anyhow.

I have already alluded to the fact that the old monarchial government of Korea ended its inglorious career but a few short months ago. While the records of the nation run back more than three thousand years--probably to a period when Job was so superbly reproaching his comforters in the Land of Uz--the late dynasty runs back only 500 years. We Americans, I may say in pa.s.sing, are accustomed to think of men of five hundred years ago, or even of John Smith and Pocahontas, as very ancient, but a pedigree of only five hundred years wouldn't ent.i.tle a family to enter good society over here. But though only five hundred years in power, this recent dynasty succeeded in doing about as much devilment and as little good as many dynasties much older in years. One of the missionaries explained to me yesterday that it was only when the King got very mad that he would order heads cut off without reason--but then the Koreans are very lazy and his inactivity at other periods may have been due to sloth.

The truth is, that most of these Oriental monarchies have been corrupt beyond the belief of the average American. When I was a boy I used to hear the old men in country churches thank G.o.d for the blessings of orderly government and for the privilege of worshipping as they chose, "with no one to molest us or make us afraid." As a rule, we take such things as matters of course, but when one comes over here into Asia and into countries where the people have been cursed by corrupt governments, where innocent lives have been taken upon the mere whim of the government, where property has been confiscated with no better reason, and where men have had to die for their faiths:--when he, in short, comes into lands where the rights of neither life, property nor conscience have been respected, he is likely to prize his American privileges somewhat more highly.

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The old Korean dynasty was not only corrupt, but unspeakably stupid.

Like the people, the King relied on sorcerers or fortune-tellers to find a lucky day or a lucky time of the moon to do whatever he wished, and in case of sickness consulted the mutang, or conjurer, instead of a doctor. Thus when the prince had smallpox some years ago, the mutang declared that the Smallpox Spirit or devil (who must always be referred to with great respect as "His Excellency") would not leave unless allowed to ride horseback clear to the Korean boundary, three hundred miles away; and a gayly caparisoned horse was accordingly led the entire distance for His Excellency, the Smallpox Spirit, to ride away on!

The government was also unfeignedly corrupt. Offices were given, just as lives were taken merely at the whim of the Throne. Taxes were farmed out, the grafting collectors taking from the people probably five or six times as much as finally reached the public treasury. More than this, the n.o.bility robbed the people at will, and there was no authority from whom they could get redress. Woe unto the man who became energetic and industrious under the old dispensation! First, the tax-gatherers would relieve him of the bulk of his swollen fortune, and what was left the n.o.ble or "Yang-ban," as a n.o.ble was called, would take the trouble to borrow but never take the trouble to repay. For the Yang-ban was a "gentleman," he was. It was beneath his dignity to work--even to guide the reins of the horse he rode--but it was not beneath his dignity to sponge on his friends (I think the verb "to sponge" is too expressive to remain slang) or to borrow without repaying. Moreover, in case of extremity, it is said that Mother Yang-ban and Sister Ann might take in washing, as is recorded in the cla.s.sic lays of our own land, but Father never defiled himself by doing anything so dishonorable as an honest day's work.

But alas and alack! for the degeneracy of our times. The Yang-bans in Korea have been deprived of their ancient {67} privileges, and I fear that even their fellows in America are by no means treated with the ancient deference and respect due to persons of such exalted merit and blue-blood.

What with the arbitrary and oppressive system of tax-robbery and the extortions of the Yang-bans it is not surprising that the Koreans here became disinclined to labor, while those who went to Manchuria, where there has been "proper security for the gains of industry" are said to be quite a different folk--energetic because there has been encouragement to be energetic. The old Korean system of taxation being arbitrary, the only way to escape a raid by the tax-gatherer was to appear not to have anything worth raiding, and with the coinage confined usually to the copper "cash" (each "cash" worth a small fraction of a cent), it was difficult for a man to have much money without everybody knowing it. If a man had much he needed a warehouse to store it in. Mrs. Bishop in her book, already referred to, speaks of a time when it took 3200 "cash" to equal a dollar in our money, making each coin worth 1-32 of a cent, and it took six men or one pony to carry $50 worth of coin! Another instance is mentioned in the j.a.panese official Year Book on Korea. The j.a.panese army bought $5000 worth of timber in the interior, where the people were not used to any other currency, with the result that "the army had to charter a small steamer and fill her completely with this copper cash to finance the transaction!" I bought a few long, necklace-like strings of this old Korean money at ten cents a string, and even then probably paid too much.

When I bought my ticket for Korea it was nominally an independent monarchy under a j.a.panese "protectorate," but the day before I sailed from San Francisco, j.a.panese aggression took another step and the country was formally annexed as a part of the j.a.panese Empire. There is little doubt, I suppose, that the j.a.panese will give the Koreans better government than the old monarchy gave them, but one {68} cannot excuse all the methods by which j.a.pan fastened her rule on the island.

Yesterday morning I went out to the Old North Palace, a deserted and melancholy memorial of vanished power, stood on the throne where Korean kings once held audience, and saw the royal dwelling in which the j.a.panese and their aids killed the Queen in 1895, and also saw the place where they burned her body. The j.a.panese minister at that time was recalled and placed on trial for the offence, and, though he escaped conviction, the evidence of his guilt was undoubted. It has been estimated that in about eighteen months in 1907-'08, "12,916 Koreans, called 'insurgents' by the j.a.panese and patriots by their fellow countrymen, were killed by the Mikado's soldiers and gendarmes, only 160 of whom lost their lives." This looks more like butchery than war. Moreover, the j.a.panese themselves have to admit that there were inexcusable delays in paying for land seized from Koreans, and in view of all the circ.u.mstances it is questionable whether the Korean hatred or dislike of j.a.pan will become very much less cordial than it is to-day.

Perhaps in no country in the world has missionary work been more successful than in Korea (there are probably 125,000 Protestants now, while there were only 777 thirteen years ago), and I have been interested to learn that there is absolutely no truth in the j.a.panese newspaper reports that immense numbers of native Christians are leaving the church since annexation. On the contrary, reports from all over the country are good, and Seoul itself is just now in the midst of a most thoroughgoing and successful Christian revival, with 1800 conversions reported during the first ten days. At a Methodist mission school I visited this morning I found that a hundred of the native pupils had been canva.s.sing the town a part of three successive afternoons with the result that they had brought in the names of 697 Koreans expressing a desire to become Christians.

Here in Korea there is no waste of energy or money through {69} denominational divisions. Each denomination has its own sphere of activity, preventing duplication of effort, and my general observation has convinced me that the criticisms of foreign mission work sometimes heard in America are based on a radical misconception of conditions.

Even the non-Christians, in the great majority of cases, speak in high praise of the splendid work of the missionaries. A typical expression is that found in the latest issue of the Shanghai _National Review_, now before me, which may be expected to speak impartially. Referring to an address by Doctor Morrison, the Peking correspondent of the London _Times_, it says:

"Doctor Morrison eulogized the work of the missionaries and we cannot conceive that anybody who really knows of their work at first hand, not as it is to be found in extreme cases, but as ordinarily carried on, should do otherwise than eulogize it."

Seoul, Korea.

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VIII

MANCHURIA--FAIR AND FERTILE

"Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night"--I remember yet how one of the dispatches began which brought so vividly to my mind the meaning of the great death-grapple here between the j.a.panese and Russian hosts in 1905.

[Footnote: "Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night. In the main street lamps burn dimly. Along dark roads in heavy dust are marching columns. The cool night is full of the low rustle of movement. Near the station, in over-filled hospitals, are heard low groans. The wounded arrive in a never-ceasing stream of carts, and another stream of ambulances moves northward, for the place must be cleared for to-day's victims. The eternal pines whisper above the Tombs of Chinese Emperors. In the fields watch fires are burning stores and evacuated villages----" And the correspondent goes on to tell of the wearied forces gathering for further fighting with the coming of dawn--men footsore and weak for want of food and water and rest. For forty-eight hours the j.a.panese had not eaten.]

The story in a nutsh.e.l.l is this:

"After the capitulation of Port Arthur, Oyama pressed toward Mukden, where Kuropatkin had established his headquarters, and there from February 24 to March 12 occurred probably the most desperate battle in modern history, if not in all history. About eight hundred thousand men were engaged. Again Oyama won, and Kuropatkin retreated in fairly good order about a hundred miles north of Mukden."

So runs the historian's brief record of the t.i.tanic struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of b.l.o.o.d.y and mangled bodies strewn along miles of snowy trenches.

I have heard all sorts of war traditions in Mukden: that at one time the j.a.panese thought themselves beaten in the battle and had ordered a retreat, when, a Russian force giving way, they turned quickly to press the advantage and s.n.a.t.c.hed victory from what they had thought was ruin. There are many stories, too, of the inefficiency of the Russian officers, stories made all the more probable in the light of the Russian Commander Kuropatkin's memoirs to the same general effect.

"Why, the English would put one of their admirals against the wall and shoot him like a common seaman for such gross neglect of duty as went entirely unpunished among Russian generals," was one man's comment as he talked with me. "The Rooshians were good fighters--fought 'and to 'and with the b.u.t.t of their muskets--and if they 'ad 'ad good commanders the j.a.ps would never have won," said an Englishman who had seen service in India. A railway man also told me of the debauchery and profligacy of the Russian officers, disreputable women travelling regularly with them to and fro, drunkenness being also common. About the same charges were reported to me by a j.a.panese officer. In fact, it is said that the j.a.panese contrived to get a very considerable quant.i.ty of champagne to the Russian headquarters one day, and the next day made a slaughter-pen of the Russian camp while the Cossack commanders were still hopelessly befuddled from too much drinking!