Flash-lights From The Seven Seas Part 19

"Why in a few days the visitor in my dream went home!" said Sauci simply. "And in a few years the j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese officer snarled at her as she pa.s.sed, "h.e.l.lo! 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 G.o.d 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 j.a.panese guards were staying, and they were huddled around a roaring coal stove.

And this is the show prison of the whole Peninsula. The j.a.panese 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 h.e.l.l 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 a.s.sist 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 G.o.d they do not flinch!" said an American missionary.

The j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese call "Dangerous Ideas." j.a.panese spies have reported certain Seoul Methodist churches for singing hymns that, to their way of thinking, were directed against the j.a.panese Government. This particular ill.u.s.tration of the peculiar workings of the j.a.panese mind might have been included in the chapter on Flash-lights of Fun; were it not for the fact that the j.a.panese officers themselves call these old church hymns "Hymns of Freedom."

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

Certain j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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.