Bird's Account on Korea
Isabella Lucy Bird (1831 – 1904), a nineteenth-century English explorer and writer, travelled Japan and Korea as well.
Her remarks about Korea in the late 19th centuru is interessting. We can see how Korea was in a difficult situation with Japanese prevailing in various sectors of Korea. And in the extension of this trend, Korea was finally annexed to the Empire of Japan in the early 20th cetury.
The Japanese settlement is far more populous, extensive, and pretentious. Their Consulate is imposing enough for a legation. They have several streets of small shops, which supply the needs chiefly of people of their own nationality, for foreigners patronize Ah Wong and Itai, and the Koreans, who hate the Japanese with a hatred three centuries old, also deal chiefly with the Chinese. But though the Japanese were out- stripped in trade by the Chinese, their position in Korea, even before the war, was an influential one. They gave “postal facilities” between the treaty ports and Seoul and carried the foreign mails, and they established branches of the First National Bank 1 in the capital and treaty ports, with which the resident foreigners have for years transacted their business, and in which they have full confidence. I lost no time in opening an account with this Bank in Chemulpo, receiving an English check-book and pass-book, and on all occasions courtesy and all needed help. Partly owing to the fact that English cottons for Korea are made in bales too big for the Lilliputian Korean pony, involving reduction to more manageable dimen-sions on being landed, and partly to causes which obtain elsewhere, the Japanese are so successfully pushing their cottons in Korea, that while they constituted only 3 per cent, of the imports in 1887, they had risen to something like 40 per cent, in 1894. 2 There is a rapidly growing demand for yarn to be woven on native looms. The Japanese are well to the front with steam and sailing tonnage. Of 198 steamers entered in-wards in 1893, 132 were Japanese; and out of 325 sailing vessels, 232 were Japanese. It is on record that an English merchantman was once seen in Chemulpo roads, but actually the British mercantile flag, unless on a chartered steamer, is not known in Korean waters. Nor was there in 1894 an English merchant in the Korean treaty ports, or an English house of business, large or small, in Korea...http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Bird/IsabellaBird.pdf
I shrink from describing intra-mural Seoul. 1 I thought it the foulest city on earth till I saw Peking, and its smells the most odious, till I encountered those of Shao-shing ! For a great city and a capital its meanness is indescribable. Etiquette forbids the erection of two-storied houses, consequently an estimated quarter of a million people are living on "the ground," chiefly in labyrinthine alleys, many of them not wide enough for two loaded bulls to pass, indeed barely wide enough for one man to pass a loaded bull, and further narrowed by a series of vile holes or green, slimy ditches, which receive the solid and liquid refuse of the houses, their foul and fetid margins being the favorite resort of half-naked children, begrimed with dirt, and of big, mangy, blear-eyed dogs, which wallow in the slime or blink in the sun. There too the itinerant vendor of “small wares,” and candies dyed flaring colors with aniline dyes, establishes himself, puts a few planks across the ditch, and his goods, worth perhaps a dollar, thereon. But even Seoul has its "spring cleaning,” and I encountered on the sand plain of the Han, on the ferry, and on the road from Ma-pu to Seoul, innumerable bulls carrying panniers laden with the contents of the city ditches.
It is still a mystery why the Empire of Japan annexed Korea while investing money into Korea more than it could take from Korea and why the then Korean king (emperor), Korean Government, and Korean elites, and Korean people accepted this integration to the Empire of Japan in 1910.
But a Japanese point of view is that as Koreans could not modernize their nation to stand against China and Russia, the Empire of Japan had to intervene in the Korean economy and politics. As the Japanese elites envisaged that Korean would be sooner or later become a virtual colony of the Russian Empire like Manchuria, it became the number-one national security for the Empire to secure Korea on the Japanese side.
If Russians had colonized, occupied, or fully controlled Korea around 1900, the Russian forces would further apply military and political pressure on the Empire of Japan so as to take any advantage in relationships with the Empire in terms of trade and politics. Russians might further try to take Japanese territory by force.
To defend the Empire of Japan itself, it had to directly control Korea for modernization and westernization of the Korean society. The Empire had to develop the Korean economy and raise the living standards of Koreans to make them stand with Japanese against Russians.
But it means that Japanese came to despise Koreans as incompetent people. And this tendency came to apply to Chinese. The Japanese people came to fancy themselves as the number one race in Asia. However, they had to correct this attitude after the war against the US between 1941 and 1945 which ended with atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Accordingly the Empire of Japan fell, and Koreans became independent again.
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Mat 8:13 And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee. And his servant was healed in the selfsame hour.