for nothing.  On many occasions they have also been forced to work in the construction of roads without receiving any wages.  To make matters worse, they must work for nothing only on the days which are convenient to the officials, however inconvenient these days may be to the unpaid workers.”  The result has generally been that while the roads were being built for the convenient march of the Japanese troops to suppress the builders of the roads, many families were bankrupted and starving.

“The Japanese make improvements,” say the Koreans.  “But they make them to benefit their own people, not us.  They improve agriculture, and turn the Korean farmers out and replace them by Japanese.  They pave and put sidewalks in a Seoul street, but the old Korean shopkeepers in that street have gone, and Japanese have come.  They encourage commerce, Japanese commerce, but the Korean tradesman is hampered and tied down in many ways.”  Education has been wholly Japanized.  That is to say the primary purpose of the schools is to teach Korean children to be good Japanese subjects.  Teaching is mostly done in Japanese, by Japanese teachers.  The whole ritual and routine is towards the glorification of Japan.

The Koreans complain, however, that, apart from this, the system of teaching established for Koreans in Korea is inferior to that established for Japanese there.  Japanese and Korean children are taught in separate schools.  The course of education for Koreans is four years, for Japanese six.  The number of schools provided for Japanese is proportionately very much larger than for Koreans, and a much larger sum of money is spent on them.  The Japanese may however claim, with some justice, that they are in the early days of the development of Korean education, and they must be given more time to develop it.  Koreans bitterly complain of the ignoring of Korean history in the public schools, and the systematic efforts to destroy old sentiments.  These efforts, however, have been markedly unsuccessful, and the Government school students were even more active than mission school students in the Independence movement.

It was a Japanese journalist who published the case of the Principal of a Public School for girls who roused the indignation of the girls under him during a lecture on Ethics with the syllogism, “Savages are healthy; Koreans are healthy; therefore Koreans are savages.”  Other teachers roused their young pupils to fury, after the death of the ex-Emperor, by employing openly of him the phrase which ordinarily indicates a low-class coolie.  In the East, where honorifics and exact designations count for much, no greater insults could be imagined.