Welsh Journals

and compel the use of the Japanese language, to destroy Korean landmarks, and to make the people forget their old life. Korean schoolboys are taught to worship the" Japanese Emperor, and are punished if they omit a shade of the obeisance to the Imperial portrait. Korean Christians are forced, at the point of imprisonment and torture, to do worship in Japanese fashion before that same portrait. This attempt at assimilation has brought the Japanese sharply up against many of the oiiristian missionaries and many of the Christian mission schools. Christianity has had a considerable success in Korea. The mission schools taught Western civilisation. They told of the heroes and heroines of liberty, from Jeanne d'Arc to Hampden and Washington. Christianity teaches free- dom. Some of the most painful excesses of the Japanese Government have been against the Korean officials of the Christian Churches. The most notorious case of this was at the famous conspiracy trial of 1913, when between one and two hundred Christian leaders of the North were brought to trial on a charge of con- spiring to murder the Governor General. They had been hideously tortured to exact confessions, and nearly all of them were at first convicted, only to be released as innocent on appeal. The whole thing was nothing but a manufactured plot of the Japanese police to strike at the Christian Churches. The second cause of failure has been the fact that the Japanese, from coolie upwards, despises the Korean. The Japanese is naturally a fighter; the Korean is a man of peace. The Japanese is filled with the spirit of his national greatness; the Korean desires nothing so much as to be left alone to till his own bit of land in peace. Finding that the Korean did not, as a rule, resist, the Japanese coolie was emboldened to go further. It is this long tale of petty persecution and minor cruelty, of scorn and contempt, which has raised the high barrier between the two peoples. The third cause of failure has been that the Japanese saw Korea as a rich prize, rather than as a high task. They started out from the beginning on a policy of expropriation. Large sections of the best land of the country were taken, usually under the plea of military necessity, and handed over to Japanese settlers. The natural resources have been largely kept for Japanese exploiters. The Japanese have been given every advantage, and the Korean has been robbed in every possible way. Financial control has been so exercised as to force him to sell his lands where they were not formally seized, and the Korean finds himself almost in a day reduced to the place of a serf to his overlord. Korean prejudices, good and bad, were ruthlessly broken. Immorality was legalised and advertised in typical Japanese fashion. The first Japanese invaders in 1904 included numbers of pedlars, with morphia in THE FACE. The face was calm as though it fell asleep To some sweet note, tenderest in all the song Of happy birds, the ivied eaves among, When summer morning breaks in silence deep,- So calm, so delicate, I could not weep. A little while she would be with us yet, The whitened brow we never should forget, their packs, who introduced the opium traffic. Social institutions, which a more experienced nation would have conserved, Japan swept aside. For some years the mass of the Korean people sub- mitted because they could do nothing else. There were attempts at uprising, as in one desperate rebellion in 1906, which lasted for four or five years, when a number of men, almost without arms, took to thø hills and maintained guerilla warfare against the invader, but it was not until 1919 that the Korean population as a whole made their voice heard. Then on March 1st, there came the most remarkable pacific protest that modern history has to record. The leaders of the people everywhere, backed by all classes, including the very school girls, presented themselves, without arms, before the Japanese, demanding their independence. They did not attempt to fight. They did not attempt-save in a few exceptional cases­× physical vengeance upon the small groups of Japanese scattered all over the country. They appealed to the conscience of the world. Here was Japan's hour of opportunity. Had her statesmen been wise enough to deal frankly and fairly with the people, she might even yet have won their confidence and loyal support. Instead, she replied with a policy of repression so brutal that it caused even the Allied British Government repeatedly to make urgent protests against the methods of torture employed. Floggings, the stripping of women, torture, burning, outrages of every kind were allowed. Fresh troops were brought over from Japan, and were given a free hand against the people. The prisons were packed so tightly that in many of them men could neither lie nor sit, but had to stand day after day-one wedged-in mass. When the outside world came to know in part what was happening, there was such an outcry, particularly in America, that Japan was induced to withdraw the military Governor General, and to promise reforms. Under the new Governor General, Admiral Saito, there have been certain improvements, but all is as yet very far from well. The policy of assimilation still continues. The policy of official torture of prisoners seemed to have developed more fiercely than ever last winter. The policy of assimilation is the rock on which Japan's ambitions are wrecked. A nation of seventeen million people, with traditions and history older than her conqueror's, cannot be wiped out. The West has an interest in Korea, an interest of humanity, an interest aided by the fact that large numbers of the Korean people are of the same Christian faith as ourselves, and an interest based on the new desire to see that justice and freedom shall be secured for the weaker nations of the world. The brow where once the raven tf" -*id creep. But when again I stood beside her bed, The face had passed within a deeper veil- Dim veil on veil covered the features pale, The last farewell had silently been said Long ere hush'd voices whispered in the place; 'Twas so we knew the passing of her face. Swansea. D Vaughan Thomas.