However it might be quite honest and fair for this writer to set down here several acts of frightfulness that came under his own personal observation merely as casual illustrations of that which is going on all the time.

One day I was walking with a missionary's wife through the streets of Seoul. There was an excavation being made and a little railroad track was being run along this excavation. A Korean boy had been set to guard this track to keep folks from getting hurt when the dump car came down its steep grade. He had been ordered by his Japanese employers to stop all passage when the signal was given.

We were walking along when this Korean stopped an ordinary Japanese civilian. He was of the low-browed type; mentally deficient I should say; but quite the average type that is used by Japan to settle these conquered countries.

The Korean held up his hands in warning.

The Japanese stooped over, picked up a stone as large as a cabbage head and, with only a space of two feet between himself and the Korean, threw it with all his force against the cheek of the Korean and smashed his jaw in, tearing his ear off, breaking his jaw bone, and lacerating his face fearfully. It was one of the most inhuman things that I have ever seen done.

The missionary woman said to the Korean when the Jap ran; "Why do you not report this to the Japanese police?"

"It would do no good. They would give no justice to me, and I would be hounded to my death for reporting it."

One evening with a friend I had been speaking in Pyeng Yang. It was midnight one Sunday and we were waiting for a train down to Seoul. As we stood on the platform waiting; a north-bound train came in. It stopped. As it stopped several Japanese train boys got off of the train. An old white-haired Korean gentleman, about seventy-five years of age, stood on the platform waiting for the train. He was intelligent looking; poised; and well-dressed in the usual immaculately white robes.

A fifteen-year old Japanese train boy, seeing him standing there, deliberately ran out of his way, lowered his shoulders like a football charger and ran squarely into the old man, knocking him down to the platform and ran on with a laugh and some muttered Japanese words.

The dignified Korean gentleman got up, brushed the dirt from his clothes; did not even deign to glance at the offending boy; and walked on as if nothing had happened.

This scene illustrates two things: First, the superiority of the Korean mind and character to that of the Japanese. This is one of the causes of the extreme frightfulness pursued by the Japanese. They instinctively feel the superiority of their captives. It is not the first time in history that a lesser nation has conquered a superior people.

This superiority in soul-stuff that the Korean has over that of the Japanese is recognized immediately by all Europeans and Americans who become, even in the least bit, familiar with the two peoples. The sympathy of Christian civilizations is with the Koreans immediately.

The other thing that this simple scene illustrates, is the spirit of ruthless cruelty and frightfulness that is bred in the very soul of the youth of Japan toward the Koreans. Even the train boys can do a thing like that without fear of punishment.

The first day that we were in Seoul, the capital city of Korea, Pat McConnell and myself were walking down the main street of this interesting city toward the depot. Parallel with us marched a squad of Japanese soldiers. In front of them, going the same direction, was a poor Korean workman pushing a small cart that looked like our American wheelbarrow.

The Japanese soldiers were in formation and marching in the middle of a wide street. But deliberately; evidently with orders from their officer in charge; they edged over to that side of the street where the Korean was walking and pushed him into the curb stone, kicking his barrow as they passed, although this meant a useless swerving of, at least, fifteen feet out of their course to do so. It was a case of deliberate brutality.

"Korea is a land of trails and terraces," said a prominent missionary in that fair spot to me one day as we were riding from Fusan to Seoul.

"And terror," added another traveler from America. "It is a land of trails, terraces, and terror!"

One day a friend of mine was begging Baron Saito, the present Governor-General of Korea, to stop the cruelties of the Japanese gendarmes in villages in northern Korea. The Baron asked for the names of those who had given the missionary his information about the cruelties and he refused to give them.

"Why should you not give them?" asked Baron Saito.

"Because they would be killed for complaining," said the missionary.

Then he told Governor-General Saito how he had once complained to the police department when a father and son were cruelly beaten in prison.

"Give me their names," said the gendarme.

"I will if you will give me a promise that they will be protected."

"No! I cannot do that! The gendarmes are very revengeful!"

I know personally of a Korean preacher who has done no greater crime than to attend a meeting at a dinner given for released Korean prisoners. He was arrested and kept in jail for three days, just for attending that dinner.

Another preacher with whom I talked was suspected of collecting money eight months after the March Independence Movement. When he heard that the Japanese police were coming for him he fled. This angered the police. They appeared the next morning at three o'clock at his home. There were only the mother and a twelve-year-old daughter left. First the gendarmes burst in the frail doors with the butts of their rifles, and then from three o'clock in the morning until daylight, they beat and tortured those two helpless Christian Korean women; kicking them all over the house until they were unconscious. These two Korean women were in bed for two weeks because of that night's experience and were not able to walk for a much longer period than that.

And these women were educated, cultured women. They had committed no crime. It was simply because they did not know where the father was.

Later the father and son were arrested. They were beaten cruelly in the process of arrest although they offered no resistance. The son later said to me, "I could stand it to be beaten myself and even to see my father beaten but the unbearably cruel thing was to know that they had beaten my innocent mother and sister when no man was there to protect them."

I cite this instance because it happened eight months after the Independence Movement, and three months after the so-called reform Government of Baron Saito had been in effect and after the Japanese Press had said to the world that all cruelties had ceased.

A case of frightfulness that was called to my attention; which seemed to me to be the very essence of cruelty was that of the moral terrorizing of an educated Korean Pastor, whom the police merely suspected of having had something to do with the Independence Movement. They had no direct evidence but submitted him to months of moral terrorizing which was the worst I have ever heard of.

For months at a stretch they would suddenly appear outside of his home and thrust their bayonets through his doors. Then they would go away without saying a word. He had absolutely no redress. If he had complained, he would have been thrown into prison.

One of the most reliable missionaries that I met in Korea told me of how one morning the policemen came to a church in northern Korea during the hour of service. They broke eighty windows, arrested fourteen men, smashed the little organ with their gun butts, smashed a beautiful lamp, tore up the mat seats from the floors, and burned them in front of the church.

At the funeral service of another young Korean preacher, Pak Suk Han in Pyeng Yang, hundreds of Japanese soldiers appeared with drawn bayonets just to terrorize the people. The church was full of Japanese officers with drawn swords.

"What would have happened if somebody in a fit of patriotism had shouted 'Mansei'?" I asked.

"We would have been killed instantly!" said the missionary soberly. "I was afraid of that!"

A prominent, educated and English-speaking Korean official, told me that in a conversation with a high Japanese official that that particular Japanese had said "Our plan will be to assimilate the Korean people!"

"But that will be impossible. There are twenty million of us. You will find that a hard thing to do!" said this Korean.

The Japanese official smiled and said significantly, "We know the way!"

The Korean knew what that meant. It meant extermination; extermination in every way possible. It meant extermination by introducing prostitution in Korea. This has been done. Korea never had any legalized prostitution. Korea never knew what the Red Light Section meant. Japan's first move was to introduce that. She sent her diseased women to Korea. She made prostitution ridiculously cheap; fifty sen; which is twenty-five cents in American money.

"Why?"

It is one of her ways of assimilation which means extermination and she has already shot venereal disease rates up to an alarming state in Korea.

Her next step in frightfulness was to introduce opium. Japanese Agents raise thousands of acres of Opium in Korea and sell it. This is another one of her steps in the process of assimilation or extermination.

Japan has stolen from poor Koreans their rice lands and their coal beds. The process is for a Japanese company to buy the water sources of the rice paddies below and then refuse to let the Koreans have water for his rice fields. This is another step in frightfulness that will finally exterminate the Korean if it keeps up long enough.

The recent massacre of Koreans in Manchuria by Japanese soldiers illustrate the Japanese spirit.

This same policy of frightfulness is carried on in Formosa and in Siberia and wherever the Japanese army and gendarme system has authority. It is worse than anything that the Germans ever did in France or Belgium. It has its only parallel in the dark ages.

I told Baron Saito, Governor-General of Korea this in an interview. He wanted to know what America thought of Japan's rule in Korea. I said: "America and the whole civilized world is stirred with indignation at the Japanese rule in Korea. There has been nothing like it since the dark ages." Then I read him a quotation from an editorial in Zion's Herald, a church paper published in Boston with virtually those words in it.

* * * * *

My friend, whom I met first in France, when he came back from. France was sent to Siberia as a Captain in the American Army.

I met him in Manila just after he had returned from Siberia. He, in common with all Americans who had seen the Japanese methods of frightfulness in Siberia, was filled with hatred.

"One night," he said, "a company of Japanese soldiers entered the little village six hundred miles north of Vladivostok where we were located. They announced that they were hunting for Bolsheviks.

"They did not find any in the little village, although they ruthlessly broke down every door of every home in that village. Then they went out to a sawmill about three miles from town and brought in five boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen.

"After torturing these boys in an old box car for two days, hanging them up by the thumbs with their arms behind their backs until they were unconscious; and then forcing salt water, hot water, cold water, and water with pepper in it down their nostrils, alternately; and other added cruelties; they announced to the village that they would release them that night on the public square."

"Did they do it?" I asked anxiously, for I was stirred to my soul's depths with his narration of cruelties in Siberia.

"Yes, they released them; in this way:

"They called all the friends and families of the prisoners together on the public square. Then they dug five graves. Then five Japanese officers came stalking across the public square, whisking at the thistle-tops with swords as they came; and then walked up to these innocent Russian boys, and whacked off their heads.

"Had they been tried?" I asked indignantly.

"They had been given no trial. They were mere boys, who, probably, didn't even know what the word Bolshevik meant. It was the worst illustration of frightfulness that I ever saw, although it was a common thing for the Japanese troops to go through the country upsetting the barrels of honey that the poor peasants were saving up for the long winters; rooting up their young potatoes; cutting the throats of their colts and cattle, and ravishing the land."

"How could you stand it?"

"We couldn't stand it. I had to fight to keep my company of Americans from sailing into them with fists and bayonets. It would have meant war. So I sent word back to headquarters that we were out of provisions and we were called back to Vladivostok."

Can this scene be duplicated in Formosa and Korea, where the Japanese hold sway?

It can.

During the Independence Movement in Korea this thing happened: All of the Korean Christians had been asked to assemble in a church for a meeting. When they were all in the church, the Japanese gendarme set fire to the church and then fired into it, killing every man.

A woman, big with child, came running toward the church having heard the shooting and knowing that her husband was within.

A big, burly Japanese pushed her back.

"What do you want?" he cried in Korean.

"I want to go in there. My husband is there," she cried in terror.

"But you will be killed if you go in there!"

"I don't care! I want to die if he is to die!"

"All right! You shall have your wish!" said the Japanese, and pulling out his sword, cut off her head, killing her instantly. She fell at his feet with her unborn child; and he laughed aloud at the spectacle.

This is Japanese frightfulness and it can be duplicated by many missionaries in Korea if they dared to speak.

But the minute they speak and tell the truth that minute they are sent home from their life work. They realize that this leaves the Koreans to the utter and awful cruelties of the barbarous Japanese, and because of this, in spite of their indignation they hold their tongues for the larger good. But they eagerly give the facts to those of us who are coming back to America so that America in turn may know what is going on in Korea. That is the only hope; that the indignation of a righteous world, without war, may bring pressure to bear on Japan to stop these terrible cruelties and tortures; this unutterable frightfulness. This is the hope of the missionaries; this is the only hope of the Koreans!

* * * * *

I don't know whether or not it was because I had been listening for so long to the most brutal stories of Japanese treatment of Korean men, women and children; with murder, rapine, burning of homes, especially Christian homes; beating of a mother and her twelve-year-old girl from three in the morning until eight to make them reveal the hiding-place of their preacher daddy, that the crimson, blood-red sunset I witnessed on my last night in Korea seemed to me like a "sunset of crimson wounds." All I know is that it happened in Korea while I was there, and that my soul had been, for a solid month, stirred to the depths of its righteous wrath over the things that I had heard first-hand from human lips.

But there it was. The sky was blood-red. At first it was black, a somber black. Not a coal-black but a slate black. Then suddenly just at the edge of the horizon a crack began to appear. It was a slit of blood. It looked more like a wound than anything else I ever saw. The slit of blood grew larger and larger in the slate-black clouds.

Then suddenly all over the horizon these wounds began to break through the mass of black clouds. Some of these slits were horizontal slits, and some of them ran in graceful curves. Some of them looked as if a bayonet had been lunged into the body of that somber cloud and a great crimson gash was made with ragged edges as big as a house. Then it looked as if some ruthless Japanese gendarme had taken his sword and slashed a rip in the abdomen of that sky; and from side to side like a crescent moon appeared this great crimson wound.

I had never seen a sunset just like it. But there it was. It seemed that there was back of that great black cloud a blood-red planet, pouring its crimson tides like a great waterfall down back of that slate-black mass until finally the curtain of black began to tear, and the blood poured through to run along the horizon, and splash against the clouds, and slit its way like wounds through the clouds of night.

And I thought of something else. I thought how a Man once was crucified. I thought how dark the skies were on that afternoon. I thought how slate-colored and somber all life seemed, especially to that little group of disciples. I thought of the wounds in His hands and feet and side. I thought of the wounds the thorns in His crown made, and of the blood that ran over His face. I could see Him there back of that cloud in Korea. I could see His Christian people being crucified again because of their religion. I could see Japanese bayonets thrust into His side and Japanese nails through His feet and His hands. I could see a Japanese crown of thorns on His head because He said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me." And I could see the blood of his wounds breaking through that nation's clouds on that wonder evening of the "sunset of wounds" back of the Korean mountains in December.



CHAPTER VI

FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS

"Oriental women are fascinating to Occidental men," said a newspaper reporter in a Shanghai hotel lobby, a year ago.

"All women are fascinating to Occidental men. Take the French girls and the way they captured our American soldiers; of course, these brown-eyed, brown-skinned, graceful, mysterious——"

"It's just as I said," replied the first speaker interrupting the second speaker, "Oriental girls are more fascinating to Occidental men than white girls."

"Yes—I guess you are right, when we get down to the honest to goodness truth of the thing," said an American oil man. "Take that Javanese girl who knocked at the door of my room; or take that half-breed Malay girl we met on the ship between Singapore and Batavia; or that little red-cheeked Japanese girl in Tokyo; or that Spanish brunette in Manila; or—Oh, Boy! Do you remember that Chinese half-breed, with English blood in her veins and an English education in her brain and Paris clothes on her back, and American pep in her eyes, and Japanese silk stockings on her——"

"Come on! Come on! We didn't call on you for a lecture on Oriental girls whom you have met," said the first speaker.

Then a bell boy paged me and I lost the rest of the conversation.

But this dialogue set me to thinking on the various types of fascinating Oriental women; the standing they have in the world; and the status of their living.

There were the Japanese women; beautiful, graceful, red-cheeked, small of stature, wistful-eyed, colorfully dressed; always smiling slaves to their men.

The well-trained Geisha girl has, for centuries, because of her superior education, received the confidences of Japanese men; while a Japanese man would scorn to talk things over with his wife.

There was the banquet we attended at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Mr. Uchida, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and many of the high officials of Japan were present with their wives. Several members of the House of Parliament were present as well as the Secretary to Mr. Hara, the Prime Minister. Each of these great leaders of Japan had his wife by his side at the banquet table.

It was a small group.

One of the speakers of the evening said: "Perhaps you Americans do not realize that this banquet is an unusual occasion in Japan. I think that it is the first time that I have ever attended a banquet in all my life, when so many Japanese gentlemen had their own wives with them at that banquet. It is a very unusual thing to do, but I hope that, in time, it will become more common in Japan, as it is in America."

This speech was met with amused laughter on the part of the Japanese gentlemen present; but laughter that was kindly; and it was met with applause on the part of the Americans present.

It was typical of the attitude of even the educated Japanese man toward the matter of appearing in public with his wife at his side.

Up in Sapporo, on the island of Hokkaido, we were entertained by a beautiful Japanese woman. We had been away from America for several months and were tired of eating Japanese food, so when we were invited to this Japanese home for a dinner we groaned.

But much to our delight, when we sat down we had as fine an American dinner as any of us had ever eaten.

I turned to our hostess, a most beautiful Japanese woman; the wife of the Dean of the College at Sapporo; and said: "Do you have servants who know how to cook American food?"

"No, I cooked it all myself!" she said much to my surprise with a bow and a smile.

And there she sat, cool and poised after having cooked food enough for fifteen people that morning; and arranging for it to be served in the finest style; with place cards, salted almonds, Turkey, pudding, vegetables and everything that makes an American dinner good; including a fine salad. There she sat; as cool, calm and collected as if servants had done all of the work that morning instead of she herself.

And never in all of my life have I seen a more gracious hostess. She watched the wants of every guest. She noted which guests liked a special food, and saw to it that they had plenty of that particular food; and, in addition to this she kept a fascinating line of conversation going constantly during the meal.

"Do you live in American fashion or Japanese fashion?" I asked her, knowing that she had been educated in America.

"Both!" was her reply. "We have Japanese rooms for our Japanese guests and American rooms for our European and American guests."

"But how do you live yourselves; how are you training your children?" I asked her.

"We are training our daughters to live in American style; on a common ground with the men. That is the better way. That is the fairer way! That is the way out of our feminine darkness!"

She said it quietly, with poise, and with a fine assurance which was thrilling. It sounded like a call to battle, like a trumpet note in the new freedom for women.

A missionary friend told me at the conclusion of that meal that this beautiful young Japanese hostess whispered to her Mother-in-law during the dinner a phrase that sounded strangely like American slang, when she noted that her mother-in-law was not carrying on much of a conversation with the man beside her, "Start something! He can speak Japanese as well as English!"

At that, dear Mrs. Mother-in-law started an animated conversation in Japanese with her silent guest on her left. This was illustrative of the care with which our hostess was watching that we be kept happy at her table. It was a Feminine Flash-light that I do not care to forget; an illustration of the possible efficiency, poise, grace, beauty and sweetness of the Japanese woman of the future when she shall have won her rights of freedom from the slavery of an inferior position to man in the social scale.

To an American, the position of woman in regard to prostitution in Japan is a terrible thing, but when we consider the light in which the Ethical thought of Japan sees it, we do not blame the women any more than Jesus blamed the woman taken in adultery in his day.

The system of prostitution is run by the Government and the largest income that the Government has, comes from the sale of Sake, the national drink, and its houses of prostitution.

A woman who becomes a Prostitute is looked upon as a heroine. This is for the simple reason that she is given a matter of several hundred yen, it depending upon her form, beauty and qualifications for her position; and that money goes to her poor parents. When she leaves her little village to give a certain number of the years of her life to the Yoshiwara in order to free her parents from debt she is lauded and feted by the people of her village and sent off as one who goes on a crusade of service.

Prostitution is so much a part of the acknowledged life of Japan that Temples for prostitutes exist where they may go and pray. In one Temple we saw large numbers of photographs put up by certain girls of the Yoshiwara to advertise their wares.

Consequently there is no fine tradition of ethical values established in Japan and the poor girl herself is not to blame. Nor is she blamed; for it is not at all an uncommon thing for a Japanese girl to marry out of a house of prostitution into a fine family.

One of the terrible Feminine Flash-lights that every careful traveler discovers in the Orient is the presence of Japanese girls in the segregated sections of Shanghai, Seoul, Peking, Nanking; and even so far away as Singapore. I understand however that a recent order from the Emperor has called all these girls back to Japan, which is an upward step not only for Japan as a nation; but for the womankind of Japan.

* * * * *

It was in a Japanese Hotel in northern China that Pat McConnell and I had our experience with the strange ways and customs of Japan. Pat was taking the pictures and I was writing the stories.

We thought it would be an unusual experience to stay all night at a regular Japanese Inn. We stayed.

That night, much to the amusement, of the missionaries who stayed with us, three beautiful Japanese girls came gracefully into the cold room where we had started to take our clothes off.

They bowed several times as they came with cups of hot tea.

They seemed to pay particular attention to me.

All three of them bowed to me first and then each proceeded to select an individual man to whom they served tea.

I took it for granted that they had paid this particular attention to me because of some special characteristic of masculine beauty or intellectual appearance; or atmosphere of greatness that must have hovered about me in some unknown fashion.

I made the mistake of swelling up with pride and bragging about this attention that I had received.

"Ah, that's because of your bald head. They think that you are the old man of the party. They have great respect for old age!" the missionary said with a roar of laughter.

The truth of the matter was that I was the youngest of the party, but those girls had selected me as the venerable member of the group of Americans.

But the climax came when these young ladies decided to stay with us "To the bitter end" as Pat called it.

After filling us with tea they still remained; bowing and smiling; even though they could not understand a word we were saying nor we a word that they were saying.

"It's one o'clock now! I'd like to get to bed," said Pat.

"How long will they stay with us?" I asked.

The missionaries only grinned in reply.

"By George, I'm going to take my shirt off and see if they won't go!" said Pat.

He took it off. The young girl who was serving him took his shirt and after neatly folding it, laid it carefully away.

"So that's what they're waiting for; to undress us?" queried Pat and the missionaries laughed again, waiting to see what would happen.

"They can go as far as they like. If they can stand it, I can!" said Pat.

Then he took off his shoes.

A young lady took the shoes, carefully brushed them off, and put them away. Then he took off socks, followed by his trousers.

It looked as they would stay until Pat got into his Pajamas. He was in a corner.

"It seems as if this young lady wants to put me to bed right!" said Pat, with a grin.

"That's exactly what she is here for. It's a hotel custom in Japanese hotels and we get so that we don't think anything of it. They bathe in the same pool; men and women alike; and think nothing of it. After all, modesty is not entirely a matter of clothes, as the Japanese prove."

"Anyhow, that's what I call service!" said Pat with a grin.

* * * * *

It was a cold winter night in Seoul, Korea. I had been invited to dinner at a Korean home; the home of a former Governor under the Korean regime; and now, a respected official under the Japanese rule.

I had looked forward to this dinner with unusual interest.

We took Rickshas to get there and nearly froze on the way.

We took both our shoes and our coats off on the back porch and left them to the tender mercies of the zero weather which prevailed on that night.

We were ushered into this beautiful home.

A room was full of men; stately sons of the family; the gray-bearded, dignified father; but no women, not a single woman. I wondered about this, for I knew that this household was noted for its beautiful daughters and a wonderful mother. The missionaries had told me that.

I wondered why no women came to welcome me.

Finally we sat down to one of those interminable Oriental dinners, with thirty or forty courses; squatted on our haunches, on the cold floor; half-frozen, cramped and uncomfortable.

Then in came a beautiful girl. She was beautiful in every sense of the word; physically and spiritually. There was a touch of refinement about her which made me know that she had received an English education.

But she was not there for any part of the dinner. Not at all. She was there merely to serve.

I found that she could speak English and every time she came to serve me, I took the opportunity of talking with her; taking a chance on whether it was diplomatic for me to do so or not. I was after information.

"You speak good English?" I said. "Why do you not sit down and eat with us?"

She laughed aloud.

"My father would drop over dead if I did. It is not the custom in Korea for the women of the family to dine with the men on an occasion like this. We eat alone in the kitchen."

"Have you a mother?"

"Yes, but she is in the kitchen."

"Will I not get to meet her before I go?"

"Perhaps? Perhaps not. If you meet her at all it will be just at the close, of the evening, providing my father thinks to call her. It is not important; so our Korean men think."

"But you; you know better? You have been in an American School?" I said, as she came in for the fifteenth course and paused a moment to talk with me.

"Yes, I know better! I know the American way of treating women is the Christian way," she said sadly.

"And what do you think of that way? Do you not like that way better than the Korean way?" I asked.

"The American way is much better." Then she paused and much to my delight used a typical American girl's phrase, with an appealing touch of pathos in her voice and a blush of crimson in her brown cheeks, "Why, I just love the American way!" she said and then fled, blushing with shame, as if she had said something immodest.

I did not see her again that evening. Nor did I see any of the other women of that household. Nor did I see the mother of the home at all.

* * * * *

It was in a Shanghai hospital. I was sitting beside an American newspaper friend who was at the head of the Chinese Information Bureau. He was a world-vagabond. Beside his bed sat a beautiful Chinese girl, who had been educated in England and whose mother was a Scotch woman. Her father was a full-blooded Chinese.

"I love her but she won't marry me!" said my friend suddenly looking up toward the Chinese girl.



She was a beautiful girl and could play a piano as few American women I have met. She would have graced any social room in America with her dark beauty, her brown eyes, and her Oriental fire. She was rich. Her father was worth several millions; being one of many shrewd Chinese business men. She was dressed like a Parisian model, in the latest European styles. She was in China for the first time in her life. Her father had brought her back to marry a Chinese boy. She did not love him. She did love my American friend.

"Why will you not marry James?" I asked her.

"My father would kill me," she said quietly.

"Does he say so?"

"He does. He went to America a week ago; and the last thing he said was, 'If you marry anything but a Chinese I will kill you!'"

"Did he really mean it?" I asked her, astonished.

"He meant it more than anything he ever meant in his life. It would be considered a disgrace to my entire family if I married anybody but a Chinese boy."

"Even though your father married a Scotch woman?" I said.

"For that very reason it is imperative that I marry my own blood," she said.

"That is terrible!" I replied catching my first glimpse of the strange and terrible social position in which a girl of mixed blood is placed in China.

"You see," she said in a quiet, refined voice, with a marked English accent, "I have an English education but I have Chinese blood. I can never be happy marrying a Chinese after I have been educated in England. I can never be happy with Chinese clothes, Chinese customs, and Chinese people. And yet if I marry the man I love, it will break my father's heart. He would kill me to be sure; for if he says he will, that means that he will keep his word. But that would not be the worst of it. To die would be easy."

"What would be the worst of it?" I asked, my heart stirred with a strangely deep sympathy at this beautiful Chinese girl's dilemma.

"The worst thing would be that it would break my father's heart!"

Then she wept.

That was my first glimpse of the life of tragedy through which a half-breed woman of the Orient has to go.

I met them in the Philippines, with Spanish and American blood running in their veins; I met Malay girls whose fathers had been German or English; I met Dyak girls whose fathers had been Dutch; and Javanese girls whose fathers had been either American, English or Dutch.

I stayed with such a woman in a home in Borneo. She had been a Dyak girl. Yet she did not look it. She had a beautiful home with beautiful English speaking children. I met her in the interior of Borneo a hundred miles from a single white woman. And yet in this far interior; living with her English husband who was the head of a mining project; she was keeping intact the English education of her children. There was a piano and the children played beautifully while the mother, in a rich contralto voice sang.

She was graceful, accomplished, beautiful, poised and sweet.

One night as we walked alone under the moonlight the Englishman opened his heart to me and said, "You are going to visit the Head-Hunting Dyaks to-morrow. You will see their abject squalor and filth. You will be surprised when I tell you that my wife was a Dyak girl and that I took her out of a Kampong fifteen years ago and took her to England."

"That's a lie!" I exclaimed.

"It is the truth!" he added.

Somehow his statement angered me. I don't know why. Perhaps it was the unusual heat of the tropics. We were directly on the Equator. I would have fought him for that statement.

But it was true.

"And the hell of it was that when I took her to England she was not happy and my people would not receive her. So we have had to come back to Borneo and live our lives in this fashion, far from civilization."

He was silent for a few minutes.

"That is the fate of mixing bloods in these tropical lands," he said with a shudder. "And the woman always suffers more than the man!"

I met another Malay-English girl on the ship going from Singapore to Batavia, Java.

She too was an educated, English-speaking girl of a strange beauty and fascination. She started to talk with me as I sat alone on the Dutch ship. We were the only English-speaking people on board and we felt a certain comradeship. We sat an entire evening talking about the problem of a girl of mixed blood in the Malay States.

"White men always assume that we are bad girls. They come into the offices where we work as stenographers and insult us. It is that taint of mixed blood. We have the longings and the ideals of the best blood that is in our veins; but the skin and the color and the passions of the worst. We try to be good; some of us; but everything is against us. We can never marry white men; though we frequently fall in love with them for we work side by side with them in the offices. But when it comes to marrying us they fear the social ban. It is a terrible thing. There is no way out! It is a thing that has been imposed upon us from the generations that have gone. We pay!"

I shall never forget her brown eyes, her brown skin, her heaving breast, as the great Dutch ship cut the waves of the South China Sea bound for Java.

"Why are you leaving a good position and going to Java?" I asked her.

"They say things are better for us girls in Java; that the Dutch are not so particular. I shall no doubt be homesick for Singapore but I am going to try Java for a while. My sister is there!"

* * * * *

A Feminine-Flash light that has its humorous side was one that I experienced in Borneo.

We had gone out to a Dyak village to take pictures.

It was a miserably hot morning. That night I stayed in Pontianak which is bisected by the Equator. It was so cold in the middle of the night that I had to get up and put on a night shirt!

The next day we tramped ten miles through the Jungle to a Head-hunting Dyak village.

I had been taking pictures for an hour in this Kampong when six of the most beautiful Dyak girls came in, with great Bamboo water tubes flung over their gracefully strong shoulders. Their skin looked like that of a red banana from toe to chin. They were stark naked save for a girdle about their loins. They had been five miles away for water.

Their skin was flushed with exercise. There they stood, mystified at seeing white men in the village Kampong.

In fact they were terrified.

Their big brown eyes bulged out.

Their breasts heaved with fear.

I said to the missionary, "Dyak Madonnas! What a painting they would make?"

"Yes, there are no more beautiful women anywhere. They look like bronze statues. A Rodin, or a St. Gaudens would go wild over their limbs and bodies."

I asked the missionary to tell them that I wanted to take a picture of them just as they were, standing with their water vessels poised on their shoulders; in their naked splendor and beauty.

He told them.

They squealed for all the world like American girls and ran for dear life, disappearing in the flash of an eye.

He tried to coax them to come out to get a picture taken. The Missionary could speak their language but they would only peek through the doors with grinning faces.

Finally they agreed that we could take their pictures if I would let them put dresses on.

I didn't want to do this; for I wanted them just as they were; but saw that they were adamant in their souls even if their brown bodies did look as soft as ripening mangos; and as beautiful and brown.

I pictured all sorts of ugly dresses; discarded by the white folks and given to them. But much to my surprise, when they appeared all dressed up for the picture, every last one of them had on a white woman's discarded night gown.

I wanted to laugh. It destroyed their picturesqueness but those gowns could not destroy their symmetrical beauty of limb and body.

"That's a quick way to dress up!" I said to my missionary friend.

We smiled but I got the picture.

And back of these Flash-lights Feminine; is the black page of the history of womankind in all the Far East; with footbinding still rampant over nine-tenths of China; baby-killing, baby-selling, and baby-slavery which I saw with my own eyes time and time again; with slavery of womankind, from Japan down to Ceylon the regular thing. But there is still hope in the woman-heart of the Far East; and the hope is the American woman and her religion. That and that alone will break down prejudices, break off shackles, and tear to bits the traditions of the past.

* * * * *

"The women suffer! Yes, the women always suffer!" said a big fellow to me up in the northern part of Luzon in the Philippines one evening.

"What do you mean?" I asked him, scenting a story.

Then the man told me of a cholera epidemic that he had passed through; of how he had tried to care for the sick, even though he was not a physician; told me of their poor superstitious methods of driving away the "evil spirits."

He told of how he had gone into homes where he found seven inmates dead and four dying; of how he tried to care for them with nothing medicinal at hand.

Then he told me of how the poor people went down to a dirty inland river and had killed a hog, taken its heart; killed a dog, taken its heart; and then after putting them on a little raft, floated them off down the river to drive the cholera away. Then he told me of how the natives had, in their desperation, tied tight bands about their ankles to keep the evil spirits from coming up out of the earth into their bodies.

"But what do you yourself do about a doctor. You say that you are 400 miles from a doctor, even here. What about your children, when they take sick?" I asked him, and then was sorry that I had asked the question because of a terribly hurt and unutterably sorrowful look in his eyes.

"Mother and I don't like to talk about that or to think about it!" he said simply, and I knew that I had torn open an old wound which was just over his heart.

His voice broke as he spoke, and he looked at the woman who was his brave helpmate and said again: "Mother and I don't like to think about that!" The tears ran down over his cheeks and "Mother's" too, and mine also.

"I am sorry! I am sorry if I have opened an old wound!" I said, quite helpless to remedy the damage I had done. I felt as one who had unwittingly trodden on a flower bed and crushed some violets. They bleed, even though you see no blood. I saw that their hearts were bleeding. But he spoke.

"We were 400 miles from a doctor. Baby took sick. If we could have had a doctor she would have been saved."

"Now Daddy, we do not know for certain about that," said the ever-conservative woman in her.

"There was not a Filipino doctor. She died in mother's arms!"

It was oppressively silent in that far-off mission home for a few minutes. I thought some one would sob aloud. It might have been any one of us, the way we all felt. I took hold of my cane chair with a grip that numbed my hands for a half hour afterwards.



CHAPTER VII

FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN

All the "Peck's Bad Boys" of the world are not confined to American soil.

I found them all over the Far East; especially in China.

I was annexed by one of them who became a sort of a guide de luxe when we were going through the ruined Palaces of the romantic regions of Peking.

He annexed himself to us in somewhat the same fashion as a thistle or a burr annexes itself to you as you walk through the field where thistles are thick.

He was an acquired asset of questionable value. With him were a lot of followers but it was plain to be seen that he was the leader of the gang; which was, for all the world, like a typical street gang in an American city.

Who could pass up that group of a dozen little rascals who followed us through the ruins of the old Summer Palace? Who could resist their imitations of everything one did? I sneezed and the little rascals sneezed also. I counted one, two, three, four, as I adjusted my Graflex for a picture and I heard a chorus of laughing "One, two, three, fours." I yelled ahead to an American member of the party and said "Wait!" and a dozen boys yelled "Wait!"

We fell in love with the dirty-faced rascals. They looked to be a nuisance when we started and I wanted them driven back, but before we were through they had become the most interesting part of the whole trip. Sure enough we emptied our purses of pennies and some white money. The little fellow who was in his bare feet and who said, with a real touch of seven year old Chinese humor, "These are leather shoes that I have on and they will last all my life," won our hearts. That was humor with a vengeance.

This lad was happy. No wonder then that when one of the party passed him an extra penny early in the morning he winked knowingly as one who had been taken into the inner councils of affection.

And no wonder that he followed the man who gave him that penny to the end of the morning, and no wonder when we told him through the interpreter that we liked the boys because they were good boys; he said in return, "Some boys would have followed you around, pulling your coats and being rude and yelling at you."

The nonchalant way in which they admitted that they were good boys won our hearts and we came back penniless.

Then who can forget the little rascals who smiled and winked back in the midst of the dignified Lama ceremonies over at the Lama Temple, proving that they were, after all, real human boys with a laugh and the spirit of fun in their little souls in spite of their having to take part in this dignified chanting service.

It was fun when the service was over to see them tumble out of the Temple so fast that one boy fell and about six fell on top of him just as American boys do pouring out of school. I even saw one lad whack another one on the back of his little bald head and a scuffle ensued. They laughed, fought, tumbled pell-mell, got up again grinning, winked and laughed back at the good natured Americans for all the world like American boys.

The Chinese have a distinct sense of humor and it is very much like that which is found in our own America. Indeed the Chinese are like us in many respects.

The Filipino enjoys a good joke but his humor is more cruel than is American humor.

The Dyak of Borneo has a sense of play and fun that would not exactly appeal to an American mind; although there are those who claim that American football is a near kin to the delightful game of Head-hunting indulged in by the Dyaks of Borneo.

The Dyaks have for centuries been known as the head-hunters of the Far East. They, in common with the Igorotes of the Philippines, have had the playful custom of going out when the mood took them and bringing in a few heads just as our Indians used to get scalps. When a Dyak youth wanted to marry a nice young Dyak girl to whom he had taken a fancy (and I can assure the reader that some of them are as beautiful as Rodin's bronze statues), he didn't even dare mention his desire for that young bronze beauty until he had brought in five or six heads. After that he had some standing in the lady's sight. Without the heads he had no more chance of winning either the girl herself or her pa or ma or any of the Dyak family than the proverbial snowball has of getting through Borneo without melting. It just simply couldn't be done according to Dyak etiquette.

Head-hunting was a game between tribes also. When two tribes of Dyaks felt a playful mood coming on, they would challenge each other to a head-hunting game. The game would last for a week or so and the tribe that took the most heads won. It was nothing like "Tag you're it." If so, some of the skulls that I have seen at Dyak Compounds would not be grinning so hideously these days as they ornament the poles of certain vain and proud Dyak hunters.

The Battaks of Sumatra also have a playful custom of getting rid of their old men. When a man gets so old that they think it is about time for him to tell his last tale, they put him up a Cocoanut tree. Then all of the young bucks of the village get together and try to shake him down. If he is too feeble to hold on, and comes down, that is a sign of heaven that his days are through and they cook him and eat him.

* * * * *

The Japanese claim to have a great sense of humor. Japanese students speaking in America, insist that this is true. But travelers in Japan do not find it so. Indeed if Japan had a sense of humor, it would keep her out of many an international tangle. She does not know how to laugh. Her sense of dignity is so exaggerated that she does not know the fine art of smiling and laughing at herself.

"What does Japan most need to learn?" a student asked me.

"To laugh," I replied.

"I think that you are right! Your Lincoln knew how to laugh!" was his response as he went off thoughtfully.

I was advertised to speak in a northern college in Japan. The Dean of the school wanted to advertise me so that the students would all come out to hear me. This is the way he did it:

"Dr. Stidger is a college student who played with the foot-ball in America. He is a man with the bigness of the head! He reaches the six feet tall; the four feet around; has an arm like an ox and a head like a board!"

I was not certain as to just what he meant by many of those references, but I was assured that they were intended to be highly complimentary to me. I am not yet sure of that but I had a good laugh just the same.

The story is told of a ruthless American humorist Hotel-keeper in Singapore who was entertaining a group of Japanese Officers from the Japanese Navy. This American had no love for Japan. He also knew of their lack of humor; so when the Japanese Captain arrived at the hotel the American Manager made quite an extended speech of welcome, as his American friends listened, greatly amused.

He said in part: "The hotel is yours! During your stay the entire force of servants is at your disposal. If there is anything that you want that you do not see, please ask for it."



The Japanese Captain bowed continuously and smiled; sucking in his breath with a characteristic national custom; the same sound they made as they eat fried eggs in a Japanese dining car; a sound similar to the old-fashioned but now obsolete method of drinking coffee from a saucer.

"There is just one request however that we will have to make of you, while you are here with us in the hotel," continued the American hotel manager.

"And what is that may I ask?" inquired the Japanese Captain, still bowing and sucking in air through his teeth.

"That you do not climb around in the trees!"

The Japanese officers did not see the joke and did not even smile but the Americans in the Far East have laughed over it for years.

Which reminds one of the night on the Sambas River when a hundred little monkeys were silhouetted against a crimson sunset.

Red, brown, yellow, golden, blue orchids flashed in the sunlight; and flowers of every hue under God's blue skies made brilliant the river banks. At times the ship went so close that I could reach out and grab a limb of a tree, much to the indignation of the monkeys who chattered at me as if I had stolen something. Now and then a big lazy alligator slid into the water from the muddy banks as the wave-wash from our propeller frightened him.

Coming back down the Sambas River, along its winding, beautiful way we sat one evening and watched a crimson sunset from the deck of the ship. At one point in the river there was a row of dead, bare trees. There were no leaves on the branches—only monkeys: big red monkeys, which they call "Beroks," and little gray fellows, which they call "Wahwahs." These monkeys were strikingly silhouetted against the crimson sunset in strange tropical fashion. From the tips of those dead trees down to the lowest branches dozens of monkeys stood like sentinels, or romped like children, or chattered like magpies. Their long curling tails silhouetted below the branches against the light of evening.

* * * * *

Most Americans who go in and out of Japan get disgusted with the regulations that policemen impose upon them.

This is especially true of those Americans living in China who are compelled, for business reasons, to go in and out of Japan, for at every trip they are required to answer the same list of questions. I traveled from Korea into Japan with the Military Attache of the Spanish Legation. When we landed a Japanese officer who had known him for many years insisted upon his answering the usual questions.

"I've been in this country for ten years and yet I never go out or in that they do not compel me to go through the same foolish police regulations which they have copied from Germany and haven't sense enough to give up!" he said indignantly.

I also traveled with a party in which there was a Methodist Bishop's wife. This Bishop's wife absolutely refused to give the Japanese policeman her age. Not that she had any reason to be ashamed of her age. In fact she could easily have passed for twenty years younger than she probably was, but she just had the average American woman's spunk and refused to give it.

For a few minutes it looked as if diplomatic relations between Japan and America might be seriously cracked, if not broken; for the Japanese officer had no sense of humor. That is one of the chief defects of the Japanese police and military system. It has no sense of humor. It takes itself too seriously. It does not know how to laugh.

To the eight or ten Americans in the party the whole matter was a huge joke and we admired the spunk of the Bishop's wife, but the poor Japanese police officer was facing what he thought was an international problem.

Need it be said that the whole matter was finally settled to the entire satisfaction; not of the Japanese officer, but to the entire satisfaction of the Bishop's wife.

* * * * *

A friend of mine who happens to be in business in the Orient got so tried of being interviewed, trailed, and made to answer innumerable questions about his mother, grandmother, etc., that one day on landing in Yokohama, in a spirit of fun, he answered the officer's questions in this manner:

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-six."

"Have you a family?"

"Yes."

"How many children?"

"Three."

"How old are they?"

"One is thirty-eight, one forty, and one forty-five."

"What is your occupation?"

"Commander-in-Chief of the Greenland Navy."

"What are you doing in Japan?"

"Getting a cargo of ice to take back to Greenland."

After satisfying his appetite for information, the Japanese police officer departed to make his reports, while the young American went to his hotel with a grin all over his face.

While he was eating his dinner that evening suddenly the Japanese officer appeared in the dining room with a big smile on his face and walked over to where the American sat with a group of friends.

As he approached the American's table he said with a grin, "You American! I know! You American!"

"How did you guess it, my friend?"

"You make me one tam fool!" he said holding out the report.

* * * * *

Some of the most laughable things that one sees in the Orient are the Japanese signs translated into English by some Japanese merchant who has picked up a dash of English here and there.

One such sign which caused a lot of amusement was that of a tailor who was trying to cater to American Tourist trade. He had, evidently, also had some contact with the spiritual phraseology of the missionaries. He had painted on a big sign:

"BUY OUR PANCE! THEY FIT YOU BETTER AND THEY WARM YOUR LEGS LIKE THE LOVE OF GOD!"

Perhaps the most exhilaratingly humorous thing that the Japanese have perpetrated on the Koreans was a list of advices printed and posted all over Korea by the Police Department as to the regulation of Fords:

RULES!

1. At the rise of hand of policeman, stop rapidly. Do not pass him by or otherwise disrespect him.

2. When a passenger of the foot hove in sight, tootle the horn trumpet to him melodiously at first. If he still obstacles your passage, tootle him with vigor and express by word of the mouth the warning, "hi, hi."

3. Beware of the wandering horse that he shall not take fright as you pass him. Do not explode the exhaust box at him. Go soothingly by, or stop by the roadside till he gently pass away.

4. Give big space to the festive dog that make sport in the roadway. Avoid entanglement of dog with your wheel spokes.

5. Go soothingly on the grease-mud, as there lurk the skid-demon. Press the brake of the foot as you roll around the corners to save the collapse and tie-up.

6. Number of people you put in the Ford: You put two in the front house and three in the back house.

There were other rules but this list will be sufficient as a Flash-light of Fun to give some idea of the ridiculous way in which the average Japanese twists the ideas and phraseology of English in the translations.

I saw one great sign which brought a smile. It was up on the island of Hokkaido. It had printed in large English letters:

"GET YOUR MOTHER'S MILK HERE!"

Below that sentence there was a picture of a cow which looked as much like a combination of an Elephant and a Camel as anything I know. The artist must have been a wonder. Attached to each of the cow's udders were long lines of hose that ran for about ten feet across a big bill-board. At the end of each line of hose was a nipple, like our American baby-nipples. At the end of each nipple there was a man-sized baby pulling away at the nipple. It was one of the funniest advertising signs I ever saw. I watched several Americans look up at it and every one of them laughed aloud. And the funny thing about it was that it was intended to be a serious advertising sign.

* * * * *

At a banquet given in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo one of the most side-splitting incidents happened unintentionally that ever happened at any banquet anywhere.

One of the sons of a great Japanese business man was speaking. The banquet was in honor of a well-known College President from America who had come to take up work in the Orient. This banquet was to welcome him officially to Japan.

One of the speakers, sitting beside Mr. Uchida, the Foreign Minister, had been a student in America where this man was formerly the college president and he was trying to make the crowd see how happy he was to welcome the president to Japan. He did it in the following language as nearly as I can remember it:

"I feel like a cartoon I see in your peculiar paper—what you call him—Puck? Judge? No—he bin in that peculiar paper, Life? That was he.

"This picture; he shows two dogs talking to each other.

"One dog he a great, what you call him—Coolie? Pug? Yes, he was a Scottish Coolie. The other was a little wee dog; a Pugnacious Dog, I think you call him.

"The little dog he have his tail all done up in the bandages.

"The big dog say, 'Little dog, for why you have your tail all bandaged up like that? You have an accident?'

"'No,' say the little dog, 'but my master, he just come home from France, and I am so glad to see him I bin wagging my tail all day long until it get broke and I have to have him wrapped up like this.'"

Then the speaker turned dramatically—with the deepest sense of seriousness; without a trace of a smile on his face, without a glimmer of consciousness of the fact that the Americans at that banquet were biting their teeth to keep from bursting into laughter; and with a grand flourish, pointed to the American dignitary and said, "I feel just like that little dog. I so glad to see Dr. —— come to Japan that I have been wagging my tail all day long."

But he got no further. The American crowd; full-dressed, and full of dignity as it was; exploded. That speech was too much, even for the sake of international courtesy, to expect such a crowd to hold in. Fortunately most of the educated Japanese there saw the joke and joined in the laugh.

* * * * *

We had a funny experience in a dining car on a Japanese train coming from northern Japan down to Tokyo one evening.

A well-dressed Japanese in a rich Kimono sat drinking heavily at a table a few feet from us.

Suddenly he looked up and yelled "Silence!" looking directly at us.

It was so sudden and so funny that I laughed. This made the Japanese gentleman angry.

Then he let forth a more extended English sentence. Later we figured that it was the only sentence in English that he knew, and that he had learned that sentence by sitting at the feet of some stern, English teacher who had occasion to reiterate that sentence frequently.

This drunken Japanese looked at me sternly for laughing and said, "Silence! All gentlemen must be silent!"

This was too much for my sense of humor and I laughed again.

"Silence! All gentlemen must be silent!" he yelled a third time.

"We must get away from him; or we'll get into trouble. I can't keep from laughing when he repeats that," I said to Dr. Goucher.

We all moved back to another table, but Dr. Goucher sat by himself at a little table. This moving, insulted the drunken Japanese and he came back to where Dr. Goucher sat and leered into his face yelling once again, "All gentlemen must be silent!"

At this one of the party jumped to the side of Dr. Goucher and took the Japanese by the shoulder and turned him around and said, "Go! Sit down, fool!"

The train was whirling through the night. There were mutterings and imprecations among the Japanese and we thought that they were directed toward us; but a missionary who could understand the language, said that the whole crowd of Japanese was severely reprimanding the drunken Japanese for insulting foreigners. They told him in Japanese phrases that he ought to be ashamed of insulting foreigners in his own country.

About five minutes after this he suddenly left his seat, came staggering down the aisle of the car with a plate full of big red apples and offered an apple to each one of us as a peace offering.

We got to calling him, in our party "Old Mr. 'All gentlemen must be silent!'" and he came to be a real character in our fun.

But one morning a month later as we were all boarding a train in Fusan, Korea, bound for Seoul, who should be sitting in the car but "Old Mr. 'All gentlemen must be silent.'"

This time he was in American clothes. We had a Japanese friend with us. We told this friend about the incident on the train in northern Japan and asked him who the man was.

"Why that is a member of the House of Lords and he is going up to Korea representing the Diet to make a report on the Korean outrages," we were told.

Another month passed and I was coming back from Seoul, Korea, to Tokio, Japan, when I suddenly ran into our old friend "All gentlemen must be silent!" This time he was drunk again, and sitting in a Japanese dining car with the same Kimono on that he had worn the first time we saw him. He saw me enter the car.

I tried to avoid him, but he was not to let this opportunity for international courtesy go by unnoticed and unimproved. So, much to my delight and surprise, he arose, and made a low bow.

I bowed back. He made another bow until his nose almost touched the car. I made a return bow. He made a third one. I followed suit. He made a fourth. I made a fourth, although I was beginning to feel dizzy and my insides were beginning to complain.

I wondered when the thing would stop. I thought of a hundred fat men I had seen on a Gymnasium floor trying to do the same thing and touch the floor with their hands. I knew that there was a limit to my endurance in a test of this kind. He bowed five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times, and I bowed back. I could see things whirling around me.

"Blame it, why doesn't he stop some time!" I said to myself.

I was desperate. Then suddenly I looked at him and he looked at me and he said, with great dignity, "All gentlemen must be silent!" and sat down, with his friends and his wines.

I don't know whether he realized how funny it was or not. I don't know whether he even knew what he was saying in his drunken condition, but I do know that when I got out of that car into the vestibule I had the laugh of my life. A Japanese woman came by, smiled at me and I am sure said to herself:

"Ah, these Americans they are all crazy!"

* * * * *

The last Flash-light of Fun is a picture from the Philippines.

I have spoken in the chapter on "Flash-lights of Faith" of the trip to the Negrito tribe, but in that chapter I did not speak of the desperate adventure of the trip back down the jungle trail to civilization after the experience with the old man.

For the second time on that memorable day I dropped in my tracks with a sunstroke. My legs refused to move. My muscles were congested with waste matter and evidently my brain was also. When I returned to consciousness I saw lying beside me Mr. Huddleston, an old missionary who had been in the Philippines for many years. Across from, him was a naked Negrito who was acting as our guide.

I looked up in a tree above us and saw what I thought was a group of monkeys.

"Look at the monkeys!" I said to the missionary.

"There are no monkeys in that tree!" he said.

That made me angry. My mind was affected by the sun to such an extent that I had an insane desire to grab the Bolo of the Negrito guide out of his belt and run it through the missionary. I made a determined mental effort to do so, but my arm would not work. I strove as one strives in a dream when he is trying to run away from some imagined danger and his feet are tied down. If I could have gotten my hands on that bolo I would have run it through the missionary without a minute's hesitation.

But my mind was detracted from this thought by two large elephants which I suddenly saw running down the path on which we were lying. I yelled aloud!

"The elephants! They will trample us man! Look! There they come!" I cried pointing up the trail on which we were lying.

"Why you're plumb crazy man! You've missed too many boats! That sun's got you! There are no elephants on this trail!"

"But I know elephants when I see them!" I cried and tried to roll out of the trail but again found it impossible to make my brain and my muscles coordinate. It was a terrible moment to me.

"My God man! Are you crazy! I know elephants when I see them. They're right on us now! Help me out of here! I can't move!"

"I tell you there are no elephants and there are no monkeys in these islands. I've been here twenty years or more!"

"But I know elephants when I see them!"

But just at that moment a much greater danger confronted us, for I saw three tigers leap out of the jungle and start after the two elephants; right down the trail toward us. Then I knew that we were as good as dead.

I yelled: "Tigers! Tigers! They are running after the elephants! They are on top of us!"

The fool of a missionary laughed aloud, as he lay on the trail and said, "Plumb crazy! Plumb crazy! Sun's got him! Sun's got him!"

"Sun's got who, fool? The elephants and tigers will kill us in about a minute!"

But just then something happened which upset my calculations and made me have a feeling that—after all—perhaps the old missionary was right—for suddenly those two elephants; being too closely pursued by the tigers; nonchalantly flew into the air like two great birds, and lighted in the tree over our heads where I thought the monkeys were. If those elephants hadn't started to fly; I should still be arguing with the missionary; but as it turned out; I shut my fool mouth and decided that the missionary was right and that I had "Missed too many boats."



CHAPTER VIII

FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM

"SELF-DETERMINATION!" That phrase has set the whole world on fire!

"Independence!" That word somehow has awakened the Oriental world; awakened that mass of humanity as it has never been awakened before.

Korea perhaps has thrilled to this awakening as no other section of the Orient or the Near and Far East. India's millions are restless; the Filipino is hungry for Independence although he is loyal to the United States; but Korea has the matter set in its heart like adamant. This determination will never be broken; Korea will never be conquered by Japan!

This dream of complete and full independence is buried in the souls of the children, as well as in the souls of the brave women, and of the old men of Korea.

"It is one of the most thrilling things I have ever seen in the Orient!" said a man on the Editorial staff of Millard's Weekly. "It is the most significant outcome of the war; Korea's passion for independence, and the Student Movement in China!"

I said to a business man of California who had traveled all over the Orient and who had been sent as part of the Commission that prepared the way for the abandonment of the Picture Bride custom, "What is the most significant thing you have seen in the Orient?"

"The determination of the Koreans for Self-determination!" was his quick reply.

"Will they get it?"

"It is inevitable in time!" he responded, and then he added: "Why the little rascals; the children, I mean; paint the Korean flags on their brown bellies, because the Japanese gendarmes will not allow them to display the Korean flag in public!" and he laughed aloud at the memory.

"Have you seen Korean kiddies with flags painted on their stomachs?"

"Dozens of them. They like to show them to Americans," he said.

A week later I was walking with a Korean missionary and asked him if what the business man from California had told me about the children was true and he said, "Wait until we find a group of them."

We waited for only a few minutes when we ran into a crowd coming home from school. A friendly smile and a low-voiced "Mansei" got attention.

Then we pointed to our own stomachs.

In a flash they caught on to what we wanted and, looking around cautiously, each little rascal untied his robe and there, sure enough was the flag of his country painted on his stomach.

"That is one of the most thrilling sights I have seen in the Orient!" I said with tears in my eyes. "If the children of the land feel that way, Korea will never be conquered!"

"The American understands! The American understands!" one of the little bright-eyed boys said to the missionary in Korean.

* * * * *

A missionary was teaching a class of Koreans about Heaven.

A little hand shot up.

The missionary nodded that the child could speak.

"Will there be any Japs in Heaven?"

This was a baffling question; for diplomatic destinies were at stake. But missionaries are usually honest, so she said, "Yes, if they are good Japs!"

"Then I don't want to go!" said the little eight-year-old Korean with emphasis.

Another teacher was telling a class in Geography to draw a map of the Orient.

One Korean child said, "Do we have to put in that little group of islands east of the coast of China?"

I met one Korean whom I had known in America. He was educated in the American universities. He was in every sense of the word a gentleman and an intellectual.

He told me that the older children of his family had taught the nine-months-old baby to raise its hands in the air above its head whenever the word "Mansei" was spoken.

I got an electrical shock of patriotism the day I saw that tiny child lift its little arms above its head when that sacred word was spoken. It was like a benediction of freedom!

"This posture of the child is more significant," said Mr. ——, "when you know that the most cruel method of torture that the Japanese use is that of stretching a man, woman or child up by the thumbs to the ceiling with his toes just touching the floor."

In that same posture of torture Koreans rise to their toes when they give their national cry of "Mansei" for all the world like an American student giving his college yell.

"It means life and death to give that cry as you know," said this intelligent Korean.

"Then what will your children do when they grow a bit older and go out on the streets and yell this cry?" I asked this intelligent father.

"Be killed, no doubt, by some ignorant, ruthless Japanese gendarme!" he said with finality.

"Then you should not allow them to teach its tiny lips that word!" I said.

"I would rather my child were dead than to have it forget that cry!"

In this same family one Sunday afternoon a two-year-old child was sleeping on a mat. The father and mother were reading some American papers sent them by their old college friends in the United States.

Suddenly that little two-year-old sat straight up in its mat bed, lifted its arms in the air and shouted "Mansei! Mansei! Mansei!" three times and then dropped back to sleep as if nothing had happened.

"How did you feel?" I asked my Korean friend.

"It made me cry. I said to my wife 'As long as Korea has babies with that in their little souls before they are two years of age, Korea will never be assimilated by Japan!'"

The children of Korea look up at the ceiling when a Japanese teacher enters a room. They are compelled to have Japanese teachers; even in the mission schools. The children refuse to do anything for a Japanese teacher.

One day a Japanese teacher thought that he would break that mood by telling a funny story. He told it with skill.

But not a child laughed, although one of them said to her father that night, "It was hard not to laugh for it was a very funny story!"

"Who tells you to do these things; you students? Who teaches you to treat your Japanese teachers in that manner?" my Korean friend asked his six-year-old child.

"Nobody tells us; we just do it ourselves! All the children hate the Japanese!" he replied with the wisdom of a grown man.

All over Korea we saw Korean flags cut in walls, carved on stones, and against excavations where the sand was impressionable to little fingers and sticks. I took many photographs of these unconventional flags.

There is one instance where Korean children went on a strike just at Commencement time. It meant that they would not get their diplomas but that was just the reason they did it: to show their contempt for Japanese diplomas.

Japanese authorities begged them to return to school.

Finally on Commencement Day they decided to return.

Something had happened.

It was a day of rejoicing among the Japanese so they invited a lot of Japanese officers to the Commencement exercises.

The diplomas were given, to each boy; the Japanese teachers bowing, and smiling in their peculiar way.

Then a thirteen-year-old Korean boy stepped to the front to make the address of thanks. He made a beautiful speech of thanks. The Japanese teachers were bowing with delight.

But the boy's speech was not finished. He paused toward the end, threw back his blouse, lifted his proud head and said, "I have only this one thing further to add."

He knew the seriousness of what he was about to do. He knew that it would possibly mean death to him and his relatives.

"We want but one thing of you Japanese. You have given us education, and you have given us these diplomas. The teachers have been good to us."

Then he reached in his blouse and pulled out a Korean flag. To have one in one's possession is a crime in Korea in the judgment of the Japanese.

Waving it above his little head he cried, "Give us back our country! May Korea live a thousand years! Mansei! Mansei! Mansei!"

At that signal every boy in that school jumped to his feet, whipped out a Korean flag and frantically waved it in the air, weeping and yelling in wild abandonment to the faith and courage of freedom in their hearts!

Then they tore their diplomas up before the horrified and angered Japanese teachers.

The result was a great student demonstration for freedom; which was broken up by a force of Japanese gendarmes with drawn swords; but not before the shooting of many boys and girls; and not before over four hundred girls and boys were thrown into prison; some of them never to emerge.

In the chapter on "Flash-lights of Faith" I told the story of the seventy-five-year-old Korean who unflinchingly faced the Japanese gendarmes and admitted that he knew the source from which the Independence Movement had come; and knew the signers of the Declaration personally; every one of them. This spirit burns in the heart of, not only the babies of Korea but also in the souls of the white haired stately patriarchs.

One old man who was dumb had his own way of expressing his patriotism when "Mansei" was yelled. He always lifted his arms above his head. He could not speak but he could yell with his arms!

This placed the Japanese authorities in the ridiculous position of arresting a dumb man for yelling "Mansei!"

They tortured him for months. He was told that he would be released if he would promise never to lift his hands above his head again.

He could not speak in answer to their demands. They waited.

Suddenly he caught their meaning. They were trying to frighten him from giving vent to his only method of showing his patriotism.

His eyes flashed fire. He leapt to his feet with a contemptuous look at his Japanese captors.

Then like flashing piston rods of steel his arms shot into the air above his head three times, shouting in their mute patriotism, "Mansei! Mansei! Mansei!"

Nor are the women void of this determination for freedom. It beats in their brave hearts. It is a great flame in their souls as well as in the hearts of the children and men of the peninsula.

"The soul's armor is never set well to heart unless a woman's hand has braced it, and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of manhood fails!" says Robert McKenna in "The Adventure of Life."

If that is a true definition of the strength of honor and the desire for freedom then the armor of the Korean men is well set.

Sauci, a young Korean girl was under arrest. She was just a school girl and very beautiful; with dark brown eyes; skin the color of a walnut; and a form, bred of the grace of her much walking race. She had walked the innumerable trails of her native land from babyhood and the rhythmic swing of her supple body would have made any race, save that of her conquerors, reverent with admiration.

Sauci was too much for her Japanese captors.

The Japanese guard struck her across the mouth with a whip.

"That doesn't hurt me. That is the grace of God. I don't hate you for that blow!" said Sauci.

This angered the Jap and he struck her again. This stroke left a streak of blood across her face.

Sauci said again, "That doesn't hurt me. That is the grace of God. I do not hate you for striking me!"

The gendarme was furious. His anger was like that of a beast. He flew at her blindly, and struck, struck, struck her woman's body until he was exhausted.

A few days later when she was recovering from that brutal beating, a high official of the Japanese gendarme force came to see her.

"Sauci," said he to her, recognizing her for an intelligent Korean girl, "why do not the Koreans like us?"

She replied, "I had a dream last night here in the cell. That will tell you why. In my dream a visitor came to our home and stayed for dinner. Then instead of going home, the visitor stayed all night. Then the visitor stayed two or three days. Then two or three months. Then two or three years. We were surprised but were too polite to say anything.

"But finally the visitor got to telling us how to run our house."

"How?" asked the Japanese official, "Did the visitor tell you how to run your house?"

"The visitor," replied Sauci, "told us that he didn't like our wall paper. 'I think you had better get new paper!' he said. 'I do not like your clothes and your schools. Wear clothes like mine, and have schools like mine. I do not like your way of talking. Learn my language!'

"So finally we got tired of our visitor and said, 'Please go home! WE do not like you! We do not want you! Please go home!'"

"But what has that to do with us?" said the Japanese official.

"Why in a few days the visitor in my dream went home!" said Sauci simply. "And in a few years the Japanese will go back home also!" Such is the courageous spirit of the Korean women.

* * * * *

One day an American friend of mine had gone to the Police Station with a young Korean girl who had been summoned to appear on what was called a "rearrest charge."

For the Japanese feel perfectly free to rearrest a person even after that person has been proven innocent of a charge. A Korean may be rearrested any time. He can never feel free.

This young, educated girl had been subjected to such indignities on her previous arrest as I would not be able to describe in this book; so she begged the woman friend to go with her.

As she entered the station a rough, ignorant Japanese officer snarled at her as she passed, "Hello! Are you here again? I thought you were still in prison!"

When he had gone from the room the Korean girl said to the American woman, "That man beat me for ten hours one day the last time I was in prison!"

"Why did he beat you?" asked the missionary.

"He was trying to compel me to give him the names of those girls who belonged to the 'Woman's League'."

"And you would not tell him their names?"

"I would rather have been beaten to death than give him their names!"

"Thank God for your courage!" said the missionary, for she had seen the girl's body when she had gotten out of prison; the burns of cigarette stumps all over her beautiful skin; the scars, the whip marks; the desecrations.

When I was told this story, amid the tears of the narrator, an American college woman, she concluded with fire in her soul: "I have never seen such courage on the part of women in all my life! Even mere girls and children have it. Most of those who are arrested come out of our American Missionary schools. There isn't a one of them who doesn't have in her soul the spirit of Joan of Arc. If France had one Joan of Arc, Korea has ten thousand!"

One young girl of whom I heard was kept in prison under constant torture for six months. And a cruel imprisonment it is. I visited this prison myself one winter day when I was in Korea. The thermometer was at zero; the snow covered the ground, and there wasn't a fire in a single room in that prison save where the Japanese guards were staying, and they were huddled around a roaring coal stove.

And this is the show prison of the whole Peninsula. The Japanese take visitors through it. But to an American even it is fit only for the darkness of the Middle Ages.

In its limited quarters I saw ten and fifteen young girls, sweet faced, cultured, educated school girls, huddled together in narrow rooms, without a single chair, so closely packed that they were seated on the floor like bees in a hive.

After six months of this awful life the girl of whom I speak was about to be released.

The guard questioned her. "Now what are you going to do?"

Her answer came, quick as a shot, although she knew that it would send her back to the hell from which she was about to be released.

"It is either liberty for Korea or we die!" she said.

And in three minutes, beaten, and dragged on the ground by the hair she was thrown into the cell from which she had been taken; to rot and die as far as the Japanese were concerned.

Another girl who had been kept in jail 135 days without even a charge having been preferred against her was released. Her old mother came to meet her and while in Seoul the mother attended an Independence Meeting for women. The whole crowd of women then went to the Police Station and shouted "Mansei"!

The mother was arrested and cruelly beaten in spite of her seventy-five years of age.

When they were through beating her they said, "Now will you refrain from yelling, 'Mansei!'"

"Never!" said this old woman.

Then they took a bar of iron and beat her over the legs until she dropped.

"Now will you refrain from yelling 'Mansei?'"

The old woman was weak, but in a low, painful whisper said, "The next time the women come to yell, if I am able to walk I will be with them!"

Another old woman was brought to prison for yelling "Mansei!" When they asked her why she yelled "Mansei" she answered in a sentence that sums up the entire spirit that is in the woman-heart of Korea.

"I have only one word in my head and that is 'Mansei!'"

I personally, one day in Korea, saw the Japanese gendarmes come for a Korean girl. She was one of the most popular girls in the American Methodist Missionary School.

It was the common custom for Japanese officials to come and take Korean girls out of these schools, without warning, without warrants, without words, and carry them off to prison.

Often the girl was not even permitted to say good-by to her American teachers or to write a word to her parents.

"They are not even permitted to supply themselves with toilet articles," said the matron to me that day.

On this day, six big, brutal, ugly faced, animal-like Japanese officers came for this beautiful girl.

The missionary women wept as the girl was dragged away. The girl waved good-by.

It was a sight never to be forgotten; one of those Flash-lights of Freedom, which burned its way into my soul with the hot acid of indignation. This injustice and indecency in the treatment of a pure girl made my blood run hot in my veins.

The look on her face I shall never forget. It was such a look as the martyrs of old must have had when they died for their faith.

"Good-by! Good-by! Give my love to Mary and Elizabeth!" she cried to the missionary woman standing by, helpless to assist her. These two names were children of the missionary home; children whom this Korean girl had learned to love as she lived in this American home.

"And the awful thing about it all, is," said the missionary to me as they took the girl away, "that, as pure as that girl is, as pure as a flower, she will be taken to a prison fifty miles from Seoul, kept there under torture for six months, and she will not be allowed to see her friends. They will not even allow us to visit her. She may be undressed and spat upon by men who are lower than animals. She may suffer even worse than that——"

Then the American missionary woman fainted.

That flash-light may be duplicated a hundred times in Korea.

"The woman of Korea suffers as much as the man. But thank God they do not flinch!" said an American missionary.

The Japanese Gendarmes have forbidden the singing of several of the great church hymns in mission churches because they insist that these are hymns of Freedom; that they foment what the Japanese call "Dangerous Ideas." Japanese spies have reported certain Seoul Methodist churches for singing hymns that, to their way of thinking, were directed against the Japanese Government. This particular illustration of the peculiar workings of the Japanese mind might have been included in the chapter on Flash-lights of Fun; were it not for the fact that the Japanese officers themselves call these old church hymns "Hymns of Freedom."

The Japanese are just as much afraid of these "Dangerous Thoughts" in Japan as they are in Korea. A good illustration of this fear is the fact that a certain picture corporation of America called "The Liberty Film Company" sent several films to Japan. The Government would not allow these pictures to be shown until that word "Liberty" was cut from the film.

Certain Japanese spies reported a Mission church in Seoul for singing "Rock of Ages."

"But why may we not sing 'Rock of Ages'?" asked the American preacher in charge.

"Because it starts off with 'Mansei!'" replied the officer.

He interpreted the thought of "Rock of Ages" to be a direct imputation that the Japanese Government was not able to take care of the Koreans and that they were flying to some other protecting power.

"It would be funny if it were not so serious!" said a missionary to me one day in Seoul.

Later they stopped the churches from singing "Nearer My God to Thee," because there seemed to be an implication in that, that those who sang that hymn, were swearing allegiance to a higher power than that of Japan.

"Ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous!" I said in disgust.

"Yes, ridiculous, but serious," replied the missionary, "when you have to live with it year in and year out."

"Crown Him Lord of All," insisted the Japanese spies, when they seriously reported a certain church for singing that old hymn was "Dangerous Thought." It seemed to this ignorant spy that "Crowning Him" was putting some other power before that of the Japanese Government.

"All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" has been put under the ban and when a certain missionary woman was asked to sing at the Korean Y.M.C.A. and announced that she was going to sing "Oh, Rest in the Lord" she was advised not to sing it because it was considered by the gendarmes to be "Dangerous Thought" and to suggest "Liberty," "Freedom" and such dangerous words and ideas.

When one Protestant preacher prayed about "Casting Out Devils" he was reported by Japanese spies, who insisted that he was talking about Japanese in Korea and meant that these should be cast out of the land.