Chō-sen is the official name of the country described in this volume and now a province of Japan, as declared in the Act of Annexation of August, 1910. Thus its oldest name, now to be better known to the world, is also its newest. Since 1392 the natives have known no other. The Chinese characters for Chō-sen, or Morning Calm, were stamped on the first and earlier editions of this book. The Japanese name of the capital is Kéijo.
By the Russo-Japanese war, Corea was saved from being a Russian province and the king and court given the supreme occasion of reform, which, if carried out, would mean new national life. Corea would have remained a sovereign state, had the chief ruler and the governing classes risen to their opportunity.
It was not to be. With despotism in the palace and a lettered class bound in cast-iron traditions, but profoundly ignorant of the world and the century, there lay beneath an oppressed populace, steeped in superstition, for which the Government did nothing. Lacking an intelligent middle class between, reform in Corea, except from without, was perhaps morally impossible.
Old Corea, an unreformed Oriental state, with all the features inseparably associated with such a society, was thus described by Lord Curzon in 1894:
“A royal figure-head, enveloped in the mystery of the palace and the harem, surrounded by concentric rings of eunuchs, Ministers of State, officials and retainers, and rendered almost intangible by the predominant atmosphere of intrigue; a hierarchy of office-holders and office-seekers, who are leeches in the thinnest disguise; a feeble and insignificant army, an impecunious exchequer, a debased currency, and an impoverished people—these are the invariable [508]symptoms of the fast-vanishing régime of the older and unredeemed Oriental type. Add to these the first swarming of the flock of foreign practitioners who scent the enfeebled constitution from afar and from the four winds of Heaven come pressing their pharmacopœia of loans, concessions, banks, mints, factories, and all the recognized machinery for filling Western purses at the expense of Eastern pockets, and you have a fair picture of Korea as she stands after ten years of emergence from her long seclusion and enjoyment of the intercourse of the nations.”
Corea as represented by the yang-ban, or ruling class, numbering with their families 200,000 souls, was dragged suddenly out into the world’s light and confronted with vital problems. Without that long interior intellectual preparation which enabled Japan in the nick of time to meet her new duties, the Coreans were neither able nor willing to grapple with the colossal tasks awaiting them. Yet this was no fault of the plain people, for it is to their credit that they welcomed foreigners. Except a morbid curiosity as to alien persons and ways, they have ever shown kindness, and politeness so far as they knew it. With amazing promptness the spiritually hungry and thirsty masses have responded with grateful appreciation to what their foreign teachers brought them. One secret of their readiness and docility lies in the fact that they were glad to be delivered from the oppression of rulers, whose one idea of government meant the grinding of the people for private benefit.
After the treaty of November 17, 1905, by which a Resident-General from Japan was established in Seoul, and which took control of the foreign relations and affairs of the little kingdom, it was found that few of those who could have effected national reform gave any indication of their desire to do so. In 1907 a fresh agreement was made, “with the object of speedily providing for the wealth of Corea and of promoting its welfare,” and the Japanese Government spent millions of dollars in schemes of practical advantage to the Coreans. When, after four years, it was found that the age-old abuses continued, and reform by natives seemed impossible, the formal annexation of Corea was consummated on August 29, 1910. The full text of the treaty, in eight articles, with preamble, etc., and English translation, is printed in the [509]Journal of International Law (Revue de Droit International) for December, 1910, published in Tokio.
The Amalgamation Convention provides:1
“(1) The Emperor of Corea shall concede to the Emperor of Japan the Corean sovereignty, together with all territorial rights.
“(2) The Sovereign Imperial Household is to be treated as a quasi-Imperial Family of Japan, continuing to have the annual allowance of 1,500,000 yen, while members of the Imperial Family and meritorious persons of the country are to be created peers, or endowed with certain grants.
“(3) The name Corea shall be changed into ‘Chō-sen.’
“(4) The Corean Cabinet being abolished, the Residency-General shall be changed into a government of Governor-General, while as to the administrative business and customs tariff, there will be no change for the present.”
The cost to Japan of the amalgamation is estimated at yen, 30,000,000, or $15,000,000. Seventy-five Coreans of distinguished families were created peers of Japan, and the monetary grants in yen were conferred as follows: to a baron, 50,000; to a viscount, 100,000; to a count, 150,000; and to a marquis, 200,000. As with the kugé, or court nobles, to prevent waste, the principal is retained in the Imperial Treasury, and the interest promptly paid at frequent intervals. Provision has been made for other meritorious persons, and the military conscription will not be put in force for ten years yet. Meanwhile, besides thousands of Corean students in Tokio, delegations of leading men and women of Chō-sen have visited and travelled in Japan.
It has always been a sore spot with the Coreans that the United States refused to intervene, though in the first article of the treaty of May 22, 1882, promise was made that “if other Powers deal unjustly or oppressively with either Government, the other will exert their good offices, on being informed of the case, to bring about an amicable arrangement, thus showing their friendly feeling.” Yet apart from the settled policy of non-intervention in the affairs of foreign nations, the United States was but one of several nations that, with a significant promptness and unanimity, [510]gladly called home their legations and handed over the control of Corea to Japan.
There is nothing mysterious to the student in the loss of Corea’s sovereignty and her absorption in the Japanese Empire. A survey of her history and a view of the world’s movement since 1866 shows inexorably the law of cause and effect. It was the weakness of Corea to be not only shut off from the world, but in her hermitage so to exaggerate antiquity and its importance as to leave the nation helpless in the modern clash of civilizations, when Orient and Occident are meeting to merge into one world society. The first infirmity of the Coreans of insular mind arises from long contact with the history and literature of the Chinese. Stimulating to the intellect, this has paralyzed mental initiative and swamped originality. The Corean imagined that China’s was the beginning and end of all wisdom. Added to this was the delusion that a knowledge of letters was in itself sufficient to preserve both society and national sovereignty.
Old Japan suffered frightfully, but not fatally, from the same disease. In Corea’s case, this insanity of literary pride was exaggerated into a crime when, after 1392, the popular religion was ruthlessly destroyed, the people robbed of their teachers, and the country given over to superstition and ignorance by a Government which Lieutenant Foulk, in 1883, after prolonged tours within the country and study of the details of administration, declared was but armed robbery.
There was no political or social unity in the Corean peninsula until the tenth century. The chief force in welding together the various tribes and peoples into the astonishing unity and similarity now visible among the people and villages from Quelpart to the Ever White Mountain was Buddhism. The missionaries of this faith, coming from Thibet and China, gave the peninsulars art, architecture, literature, folk-lore, a noble path of morals for guidance in this life, vast consolations for the future, and pretty much everything that means culture, refinement, and civilization. In very early days, before Mikadoism in Japan was formulated into a militant dogma, the islanders and the peninsulars, the Japanese and the Coreans, were virtually one and the same people, and in about the same stage of civilization. In the reaction of nature [511]upon man and of man upon nature, during ten centuries, the two peoples were differentiated, and the two languages—almost exactly the same in structure, thus proving their common origin—developed their vocabulary and local pronunciation. The two nations, according to their ethnic mixtures, heredity and environment, grew further and further apart. Nevertheless, to-day, after a millennium of separation, the underlying elements are so much greater than the surface differences that the prospects of an amalgamation of the two peoples are decidedly promising.
In the main, the history of Corea is like its landscape. Her political annals, as thus far studied, seem like monotonous undergrowth among which loom indistinct figure-heads. As bare as her desolated coast or denuded mountains, the scene in historic perspective reminds one of the peninsula’s lava beds, her square leagues of disintegrated granite, or her waste lands, out of which rise sculptured rocks, and whence emerge the Miryeks, or stone colossi, amid ruins surrounded with forests. To a native scholar his nation’s chronicles are not without a rugged grandeur of their own, besides a rich coloring that recalls the rock-scenery of Corea when looked at in the sunlight.
To the alien student, Buddhism looms as the chief civilizer and the mother of popular culture. It is certain that during its thousand years of growth and prosperity in the peninsula the people were as one flock led by one shepherd. They were trained in what was at least beautiful and human. Corea’s debt to Buddhism is unspeakable. Even to-day, in the land so often invaded, desolated, peeled, and scraped by Tartar, Chinese, and Japanese marauders, and raided by men from countries called Christian, almost everything that remains to touch the imagination, whether in architecture, rock sculpture, stone colossus, pagoda, in art, and even in literature, apart from erudition, is of Buddhist origin.
When, after A.D. 1392, the popular faith was banned, its temples, schools, monasteries, and works of art destroyed or doomed to decay, its priesthood socially outlawed and oppressed even to beggary, the people were left to ignorance and superstition and were as sheep without shepherds. They became the prey alike of the ruling classes and of sorcerers and fortune-tellers, who, though densely ignorant, lived by their wits and wickedness. Parasitic [512]spoilers of all sorts, from the palace to the hovel, thrived, while the people, the foundation of the state, existed on life’s narrowest margins. Confucianism, as made into a state ritual since 1392, and as interpreted and developed by the yang-ban, or educated and office-holding classes, meant neglect of the land, the grinding of the people’s faces, the permanent destruction of popular wealth and comfort, the paralysis of the motives to industry, and the creation of a standing army of inquisitors, office-seekers, and office-holders, and their satellites and hangers-on, with headquarters in Seoul. In place of the spiritual bread of Buddhism, the new régime offered a stone. In government, instead of the egg for nourishment, they proffered a scorpion—even chronic extortion. A great gulf was fixed socially between the men to whom education meant the stifling of original thought, a ban on mental initiative and the oppression of the people. Monopoly of office and privilege, as held by one class, meant systematic robbery of the populace, the Government itself being an engine of oppression by which fewer than one-quarter million yang-ban subsisted upon eleven million of the common folk.
When reform was called for which meant public benefit, apart from private rapine or individual advantage, manual as well as clerkly labor, continuous and unselfish toil with only slight pecuniary reward, the average high-class native proved a total failure. Despite the purging from the palace of several hundred women, and over a thousand male persons who drew salaries, the remainder within, or parasitic to royalty, proved worthless for the remaking of the nation.
Ever under the spell of the Chinese characters, saturated with the ideas of Confucianism run to seed, having only one ideal of life—selfish advantage and the subordination of the lower classes—devoted to their sensual enjoyments, their long pipes, and their liquor, to checker-playing, gossip, and elaborate idleness, the yang-ban during five centuries did nothing to develop the soil or the resources of the country. On the contrary, the office-holding class systematically hindered the development of wealth, or even thrift, by extortion, unjust taxes, and dishonest manipulation of imposts, which were paid in kind instead of in coin, by exactions or forced loans never repaid—usually under the menace and reality of beating, [513]torture, and imprisonment. One innovation under the Japanese rule, which made taxes payable in cash and not in kind, wrought infinite blessing to the people and carried consternation to the army of extortioners.
In the modern world-life, Japan and Corea are as necessary to each other as are man and woman. It soon became evident to the Tokio Government, after every step, that some stronger remedy than advice would be necessary to heal the age-old and deep-seated Corean disease that seemed as incurable as leprosy. Hence the measures of 1907, which put into the hands of the Mikado’s Resident-General still greater powers.
To this work of reforming Corea, Nippon gave her ablest son, one who, both in feudal and constitutional Japan, had dedicated his life to promoting the evolution of the modern man. The statesmanship of Ito was that of a lover of humanity, who might well, after long and multifarious labors, have taken the rest which he craved and which his physical condition demanded. Nevertheless, with his unique experience and amazing abilities, he applied himself with unremitting toil to lead the once hermit nation into the twentieth century. According to Ito’s motto, “The secret of statesmanship consists in securing the contentment of the people.” He was all the better fitted for his colossal task by having known so well the late feudal Nippon with its political diseases. Neglect of the people and of the soil, official falsehood, and class oppression were characteristic of both countries. Ito took all the more encouragement because life in Chō-sen was but the mirror of that in old Japan. Having fought belated feudalism and grappled with the new problems of a modern state in Asia, none was better equipped than he for the task of making a progressive nation out of a people whose mental eyes were set even further back in their heads than those of the Chinese.
For while China boasts of Confucius, Corea penetrates further into the primitive. She hails as the founder of her social order, Kija (Ki-Tsze, or Kishi, pp. 11–15), the distant ancestor of the Chinese sage. On this nursery fairy tale of the nation—since the peninsulars knew nothing of writing until, long after the Christian era, they obtained the Chinese ideographs—every Corean for a thousand years or more has been brought up. The early mythology [514]and legend of the peninsulars are about as trustworthy as those of the neighboring islanders, whose conceit of antiquity was once fully as great and whose official and orthodox chronology was fixed and published so long ago as A.D. 1872!
This myth of Kija, as the actual founder of civilization east of the Yalu, took its literary form only in the eighth century, when the Coreans had become saturated with Chinese ideas. Then the peninsulars, made acquainted with Chinese historiography, and having but one model before them, faithfully followed it (as did the Japanese also), the Coreans surpassing even the greater nation in pride of antiquity and in the glorification of heroes, who loom up in vaster proportions according as the unrecorded centuries multiply and recede into the past. Historical science has already begun to change this perspective of antiquity as surely as hospitals have furnished object-lessons in the law of cause and effect. Corean gods and demons, more numerous even than old Japan’s mythical menagerie and pantheon, are being steadily banished to the realms of fairy-land.2
Ito, scorning delights and living laborious days, continued the labors, but vastly enlarged the plans of his predecessors. First of all, having deported hundreds of the bad subjects of the Mikado and curbed the rapacity and brutality of his own countrymen, he applied himself unceasingly to healing the wounds of war, to indemnifying the unjustly impoverished natives, and to giving Corea what she never had—or, if possessed of, had allowed to lapse during the five hundred years of the dynasty that had destroyed the people’s religion and had done nothing for national development. A system of good roads, honest coinage and currency, courts and justice, popular education, afforestation of the mountains, improvement of the soil through scientific agriculture and reclamation of waste land, preventive hygiene, honest taxation and collection now exists. Ito cleansed the palace, separating the functions of Court and Government, lessening by fifty per cent. the number of persons paid from the public treasury, both male and female, removing as far as possible the king and his advisers from the great mob of sorcerers, fortune-tellers, geomancers, and others who [515]prey upon the Corean people. The deposition of the incompetent emperor and the installation of his son in power were followed by the education of the crown prince in Tokio.
The difficulties in the way of reform were appalling. The principal obstacles existed in the two classes of which Corean society is composed—oppressors and oppressed. The yang-ban, or privileged men, with more or less scholarship of a Chinese kind, seemed to have no conception of patriotism apart from pelf. Their chief trait was political vampirism. On the other hand, the supine attitude of the common people, accustomed for centuries to systematic oppression, was discouraging. To them even decent government, that is, the kind which could be tolerated to the point of rebellion, meant the grace of their masters and rule without robbery. One of the striking features of nearly every Corean town or city is seen in the long rows of tablets in stone or iron that celebrate the merits of “good,” that is, fairly decent, governors. A collection of all the local instruments of torture, stacked in one museum, would be impressive and furnish fuel for a vast conflagration.
In education, progress was hampered by the general prevalence of fanaticism on the subject of “race suicide” and in the absurd measures taken for its prevention—measures that largely tend to hinder the end in view. In Corea the marriage and birth rate may possibly be in excess of that of any country in the world, while, almost as matter of course, and as a scientific corollary, the same may be said of the death rate, which, owing to superstition, ignorance, and dirt, is appalling. Corea, despite shining white clothes, is not a land of bath-tubs. In the schools, nearly all the boys were found to be married, and to girls older than themselves. These over-mature youths, of antediluvian frame of mind, too often seem to have eyes set too far back in their heads, which fix their gaze on duties appropriate to the time of Confucius rather than of the twentieth century.
We have glanced at this subject before. Yet even to-day, with all the advantages afforded them, there is danger. Expecting, like their fathers before them, to be verse-makers, to quote from the ancient Chinese, to be literary, and to hold office, because of a knowledge of the characters, the young Corean yang-ban are indifferent to useful progress and scorn manual labor. Having already [516]lost nearly everything, they will, unless radically changed in mind, lose all. The one hope of Chō-sen is the raising up in a generation, now under new influences, of a new type of humanity. The Christian schools and churches are supplying this need.
Indeed, the fall of yang-banism and the extinction of Corea’s sovereignty means Buddhism’s opportunity. It will be both logical and natural that one of the first effects of Christian missions will be, as in Japan, to quicken the spirit and improve the form and power of the older religion. Nor ought missionaries fear its vigorous competition, should it become potent for the abolition of demon-worship and the moral uplift of the masses otherwise neglected, especially in out-of-the-way places.
Unfortunately, Corea of mediæval mind, like barbarous Japan of not so many years ago, sought a remedy for supposed wrongs in assassination. Rashly unintelligent, sword and bullet were resorted to in order to stop the car of progress. Quick to misjudge and impatient to wait for results, the assassin selected as his first victims his country’s best friends. The weak and disappointed tried suicide as a remedy and deterrent. The insurgents in the so-called Righteous Army, too often were robbers of their own people. In the name of patriotism they attempted redress, seeking to turn back “modern civilization which rides on a powder cart.” The list of Coreans who in cowardice or discouragement died by their own hands, who were slaughtered by their own compatriots, who fell beneath the bullets or the swords of rebels in civil strife, or who were mown down by the resistless fire of the Japanese infantry, is sadly great.3
The Mikado’s soldiers were perhaps frequently unable to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving. Their actions are not absolutely free from criticism. Yet with unrestrained frankness the statistics of the military operations are given in the Annual Reports on Reforms and Progress in Korea, in 1907, 1908–9, and 1909–10. From July, 1907, when the riots broke out in Seoul, on account of the disbanding of the Corean army, to the end of 1908, there were of Japanese soldiers 179 killed and 277 wounded, besides 67 Japanese residents killed in 1907 and 16 in 1908. Of Corean [517]insurgents, 14,566 were “killed.” Besides positive military measures, the Corean Emperor’s rescripts urging those in arms to submit quietly were effective, and the total of those who surrendered and were pardoned to December 13, 1907, was 8,728. During the fiscal year 1909 the Japanese lost 38 men, but the number of insurgents killed (3,001), wounded, captured, or surrendered was 6,131. Those in arms who yielded or asked pardon were given employment in road-making and other useful occupations. By 1911, most of the activity of native insurgent bands had degenerated into the work of mere banditti. Military movements on a large scale were not required, and much of the desolation of villages was repaired with better hope of more comfortable existence. Frightful as is this frank showing, it is doubtful whether more lives were lost in the suppression of rebellion, from 1907 to 1911, than in the nearly chronic anarchy that prevailed in the southern provinces during the previous decade and a half.
The Annual Reports above referred to show by text, pictures, and statistics, not only the purpose and results of the Japanese Government, but also the fearful cost of restoring order, a cost of life and treasure aggravated both by natives who have not scrupled to use the torch, the mulct, and the assassin’s weapon on their own native soil, and by foreigners who, in the name of liberty, abused the freedom of the press and kept the useless and dangerous embers of sedition in a flame. Not satisfied with murder at home, Coreans have made the United States, already the happy hunting ground of the Black Hand and the lyncher, the arena of their cowardly exploits.
After Mr. Durham White Stevens, an American of long experience in the Far East, and Diplomatic Adviser to the Corean Government, had been shot and killed in San Francisco by a Corean, the most shining mark was Corea’s best friend, Ito. Made a prince and rewarded with every mark of honor possible to a subject by the Emperor of Japan, this man who, in unquailing discharge of his duty, had already braved the Japanese feudal sword wielded by cowards in Choshiu, and the infuriated Tokio mob in constitutional Japan, and who seemed immune from the assassins of which old Japan raised such a luxuriant crop, fell in Manchuria at the Harbin railway station, on October 26, 1909, before the [518]bullets of the petty revenger, who shot from behind. Amid the grief and the honor of the whole world, on November 4, 1909, Ito was given a State funeral such as has been bestowed upon few subjects of Japan. Ito shed his blood in the cause of peace. Whether these assassinations hastened the absorption of Corea by Japan, and the blotting out of a sovereignty unknown to the world until Japan, by peaceful diplomacy, conferred it in 1876, is not known. The Emperor at once appointed General Viscount Terauchi, then Minister of War, and already famous for his brilliant military record and notable organizing abilities, to be the successor of Ito in Corea. The record for energetic action, consummate tact, and ceaseless toil already made by Terauchi places his name very near that of Ito as a modern civilizer and lover of the victories of peace even more than those of war.
Despite all the instances of individual wrong, private injustices, and public mistakes made by the Japanese in Corea, and in view of the severe criticisms of Terauchi by such leading Japanese newspapers as the Kokumin and Kochi, it is nevertheless manifest that the policy of the Tokio Government is antipodally the reverse of that of Hidéyoshi. Instead of the Ear-tomb, and the scooping of Corea clean of her artists, artisans, potters, and art treasures, there rise to-day the school, the hospital, and the temples of justice and finance. Plans are being perfected for the development of the soil and of the wealth of the nation, in the interest of the people, while to the missionary and alien philanthropist is given all encouragement. A new land survey is in operation for the equalization of taxes. Light-houses have reduced the dangers of a foggy and treacherous coast. Harbor works are in course of construction; well-made common roads are decreasing the difficulty of transport; while these and the highways of steel continually increase the value of the arable lands and of town lots. Rivers, even the wide Yalu and Han, are spanned by bridges. Many a place, historic because of war, is now famous for its commercial and industrial development. Piracy gives way before policemen in steam launches, and chronic brigandage is dying out. In all that relates directly to humanity, the reform of the judiciary methods of justice, prison procedure, the codification of laws, etc., the progress is marvellous. At the head of the judicial department is a Christian, Judge Watanabé, [519]and many men of this faith, Japanese and Corean, fill other high offices. Special schools, of medicine, surgery, nursing, scientific agriculture, forestry, live-stock improvement and manual training, are preparing young men and women to raise the standard of human life in Chō-sen and to reclaim the sixty-six per cent. of the arable land in the peninsula which has lain waste.
The absorption of Corea by Japan has given the astonishingly successful Christian missionary work a new environment, and one for the better, despite the manifest dangers of misunderstanding arising temporarily from the political situation and the eager readiness of a few Japanese press correspondents to misrepresent. With full religious liberty, and under the protection of a firm, orderly, and impartial government, the great work of raising up the new type of man and woman in Chō-sen, now one of the most promising of mission fields, proceeds. In the Christian household, numbering roughly about 200,000, we discern the best promise for Chō-sen’s future. Into his new world of hope and cheer, the native, when enlightened and converted, brings the richest inheritances of the national culture, the best results of his training, and the most winning traits of his character. This is strikingly shown in the general eagerness to read and study the Holy Scriptures, in the wonderful powers of memory, and in the committing of large portions of the Bible, which is now accessible in the vernacular. The native’s generosity, good-nature, power of self-support, mutual desire and practice of helpfulness, patience, and power to endure persecution of any and all sorts fit him admirably for Christian service.
Christianity has come to Corea to reveal the national treasures that are enduring. For centuries the beautiful phonetic alphabet, en-mun, and syllabary Nido (p. 47), lay neglected and scorned by the learned. Yet this was but one of many elements of potency for good that lay unused like barren rocks. At the smiting of the missionaries’ hand of faith gushed forth the waters of life and healing. The new messages of hope and salvation came to the people not only in their own tongue, but in their own script. Christian teachers, after long years of discouragement, have made, through the patience of hope, of love and sympathy, a real conquest of the Corean heart. The faces of men and women are lighted up with [520]a new glow of interest in life here and hereafter as they find both body and soul ministered to by their friends from afar. With this spiritual invitation and challenge to enter into the promised land fully accepted by the Coreans, it is not too wild a dream to imagine even the strong conqueror conquered by the weaker. Samson’s experience and his riddle may be the Corean’s. Chō-sen may yet be to Nippon what Palestine was to Greece and Rome. Bereft of political sovereignty, from the land of the Hebrews went forth that salvation which “is of the Jews” to conquer Europe and the world. Already, by closer contact of the humbler classes of the two nations on Corean soil, the paganism of rustic Japan—hitherto almost untouched by the gospel—begins to disintegrate and ferment because of the leaven brought from Christian Chō-sen. This has the Corean left—and perhaps more abundantly than ever before—“power to become” the spiritual regenerator of Japan. [521]