Part 5 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+nto 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.
{60}
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 fas.h.i.+on 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.