Chapter XIV: Korea or Chosen

Though her specialty is islands, Japan now has a large slice of the continent of Asia in her empire. During her war with Russia she found that the peninsula we usually call Korea was a “convenient springboard” from which her enemies could jump upon old Japan. Also the Koreans, who were formerly a part of the great Chinese Empire, had a very corrupt government. So the Japanese decided that it would be safer for themselves, and perhaps better for the Koreans, if they took charge of the peninsula. First they called it a “protectorate,” and left the old Korean Emperor on his throne in Seoul, requiring him to reform his government so as to be more like their own. But in 1910 the Emperor was deposed and the Japanese made Korea a part of their own empire, with a Japanese governor-general as the chief ruler.

From Shimonoseki, at the western end of the largest Japanese island, it was a comfortable one-night trip by a big Japanese steamer across to Fusan, at the southern end of Korea. We found this latest addition to the empire very different from the rest of Japan. The Koreans in some ways resemble the Japanese and in others the Chinese, yet they are enough different from either to be quickly recognized. Moreover, their costumes and customs and indeed the landscape of their peninsula are quite new to one who has been traveling through Japan.

American Trains in a Far-away Land

Instead of the little Japanese trains with long upholstered seats on either side of the cars, Korea has regular American trains. Hearing the loud whistle of a locomotive made in Philadelphia, so different from the screeching little engines of Japan proper, we could almost imagine ourselves back home again. But the people in the train, and the scenes that raced past the windows, were not a bit American. Korea is a land of villages that look like clusters of great mushrooms, for their roofs are thatched with rice straw. There are a few cities, and in them many buildings have tile roofs and resemble the houses of China. The continental part of the Japanese Empire, almost as large as its biggest island, yet only about half as large as our similar peninsula of Florida, has a very much greater population. Most Koreans are peasants living in villages near their fields; so you can understand why those mushroom villages are so numerous.

It was June now, and the sun beat down from a sky without the least little cloud in it, upon almost endless rice fields. The Koreans grow cotton and tobacco also, and some wheat, millet, and barley in the northern part of their peninsula. But we might have fancied, seeing these fields hour after hour, that they grew nothing but rice. If we could have seen the peasants eating their dinners we might have formed the same impression, for the great mass of the people eat very little except rice.

Countryside and City

There were almost no trees to break the sun-flooded rice lands. One of the weaknesses of the old Korean Government was that it let the people cut down all the trees. Knowing that the loss of forests means that there will be both droughts and floods, the Japanese protected theirs, so that they not only have much finer scenery than either Korea or China but they possess the water supply so necessary for growing food. In Formosa they even replant camphor trees to take the place of those they cut down. In Korea the Japanese have started tree nurseries, like those of Germany, and in time they hope to have the peninsula well forested again.

One thing about Korea that strikes every traveler from America or Europe is the scarcity of real roads. Before the Japanese came, there were only trails in most parts of the peninsula, so that travelers had to go on foot or horseback, and produce on animals’ or men’s backs or on wheelbarrows. Now the Japanese are building modern roads, but they are not very good road-builders, and floods in a treeless country quickly fill the rivers and tear out the bridges. We did not see an automobile all day long, and very few other vehicles. Later I found that Fords sometimes run to towns at a distance from the railway. But even those often have hard work getting over the rough earth roads, and have to be ferried across rivers where bridges have been washed out or have never existed.

Two Korean salesmen on the streets of Seoul. The one on the left has a
load of firewood (small branches of evergreen trees), which he has
brought to the market-square on the back of his patient bull. The
peddler on the right has chickens to sell. The fowls are carried in
a network frame or cage which has legs so that it may be set down
when a customer is found. The roosters crow as if they enjoyed the
ride.
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Seoul, the Capital City

A Japanese woman (in front) and a Korean woman (behind) in the streets
of Seoul show rather different costumes.
]

We rode ten hours on our American train, reaching Seoul, the capital of Korea, only as the sun set. Yet this city is in the middle of the country, and it takes even longer by train to get to the northern boundary. Once Seoul had a great wall all around it, like the cities of China. But the Japanese do not believe in city walls. They know those old walls that were once so useful in warfare are of no use whatever against the great guns of to-day. Moreover, they say the Koreans cannot fight unless behind walls, and naturally they would not want their new subjects to have any advantage in case of a possible attempt to drive the Japanese out of the peninsula. So the picturesque walls of old Seoul have all been torn down. Some of the great ornamental gates have been left, but only as monuments.

Those who came to Seoul fifteen or twenty years ago found the streets very narrow, and deep either in mud or in dust, depending on the weather. Even rich people went about the city on foot or on horseback, or perhaps in sedan-chairs, and it took them hours to get from one part of town to another. Some of these quaint little streets are still left; but there are many wide paved streets now, with automobiles, and electric street cars running from one end of town to the other.

The Koreans like to sleep during the hottest part of the day in summer, and they can sleep almost anywhere, with the ground as a bed and a brick as a pillow. When the street cars first came, Koreans who wanted a nap thought the high rails made a fine pillow, and some of them were killed by the cars. All that is changed now, and Seoul is a busy and quite a modern city.

Beneath this famous old kiosk of Seoul, with the lines of monkeys in
tile running along its four ridge-poles, there is a monument on a
great stone turtle. The turtle, which means long life to Koreans and
Chinese, is often seen as a monument or as the pedestal of a carved
slab of granite.
]

Yet one still finds much that is picturesque in the capital. The palaces of the former rulers, where the deposed Emperor (who has since died) lived even after the Japanese took his power away from him, are very gaudy buildings, with flaring tiled roofs, inside high walls with ornamental wooden gates. Quaint old temples filled with statues of gods and demons in all the colors of the rainbow still peer out from among the low houses and from groves on the surrounding hillsides. But the big modern government buildings of the Japanese overshadow the old palaces, and when you climb a hill and look down upon Seoul you will be much less likely to see the temples than the bulking red brick churches built by Christian missionaries. The mythological stone animals of the old Korean city are not nearly so conspicuous as the big new wheel-shaped prison built by the Japanese, and the once sacred Temple of Heaven is now an ice-cream pavilion in the garden of the best Japanese hotel!

Funeral Customs

Sometimes we heard in the streets those weird sounds which the Koreans think are music, and looked out to see a funeral passing. The Korean hearse has no wheels but is carried on men’s shoulders. Although some of the mourners now may ride in rickshaws, most of the people behind the hearse are on foot. At least half of them are men and boys hired to carry the many strange things that must go in a Korean funeral procession. They are dressed in red and green and other gaily-colored garments, sometimes rather worn and dirty, which belong to the director of the funeral rather than to those who are wearing them.

Once I followed one of these queer funerals out over the hills. When it had left the city it moved more and more slowly. Some of the mourners and other followers dropped out and went back home. Far out among the rice fields the rest of the procession sat down for a while to rest, and then went on again, the queer music still howling and squeaking and banging. In former days the Koreans buried their dead wherever the “wise men” who make that their business told them to, so that the hills about Seoul are covered for miles and miles with little green knolls. But now the Japanese allow them to bury only in certain places, and are inducing some to follow the old Buddhist custom of burning corpses. Many of these processions end at an ugly brick building with a tall chimney, looking like a little factory lost among the green hills. There the bodies are cremated.

Korean hearses are made so that they can be taken apart. After each funeral, those in the procession wander back to Seoul by short-cuts over the high hills, the pallbearers each carrying a part of the bier, and laughing, chatting, and smoking their little pipes. In among the hills there are little monasteries, where Korean Buddhist monks with shaven heads lead rather an idle existence, though they pray often before their gaudy wooden and plaster gods. Here and there is a royal tomb, quite different from the simple grass-covered and often unmarked graves of ordinary people. There was one of these royal tombs on the trail we sometimes followed from the city to the home of the missionaries with whom we lived beyond the hills. First, behind a wooden memorial arch, there was a great cut-stone platform with two or three stone steps leading up to it. Part of this was covered by a small wooden temple topheavy with its great tile roof. It is here that the spirit of the little dead prince who is buried farther back is supposed to make its home. But we could see, through the torn paper panes that took the place of glass in the doors and windows of the temple, that there was nothing but a dirty bare floor inside.

Higher up on the grassy hill, a hundred yards from the temple, was the green mound of the grave itself. It was several times as large as the grave mounds of ordinary Koreans. There was a high gravestone, with a few words in Chinese characters and a top that looked like a roof, or a hat. Around the grave stood the guardians of the dead prince, all badly made of stone. There were two horses, two sheep, two queer things supposed to be lions, and several other pairs of protectors. The most imposing and best made were two stone mandarins, or high officials, in long robes and high headdresses, who gazed kindly at the grave of the little prince, without ever taking their eyes off it from one year’s end to another.

Such strange stone figures as these guard a royal grave in Korea.
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Back of the grave was a semicircular brick wall, such as the Koreans think protects the dead against evil spirits coming from the north; and surrounding the place was an old pine forest, with a caretaker’s house set in the edge of it. The Koreans, who have destroyed their trees nearly everywhere else, are very careful of the sacred groves.