514 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
H-judged appraisal, the combination of martial prowess and technologi-
:al resourcefulness through which those ineffective-looking Koreans*
indomitable forebears had once countered and defeated a Japanese assault
upon their country in the Korean-Japanese War of A.D. 1592-8. This
idmonitory testimony of Korean history had been ignored by the Wes-
tern traveller in A.D. 1929, as his own words now rose against him to
testify.

*[The] inaudible music of the Korean landscape [this traveller had writ-
ten in A.D. 1929] was not the serene and triumphant "music of the
spheres". It was an elegy in a minor key—a dirge over a country that was
in the autumn of its days. The rhythm was repeated in the movements of
the little people who were working conscienciously but languidly in the
fields or creeping along the roads. The little men and little women were
all dressed in white—appropriately to the country's mood, since white in
the East is usually the colour of mourning, yet in a manner obviously quite
unsuitable for the day's work. In other countries the husbandman girds
up his loins for the combat with Nature. But nobody could possibly gird
up those voluminous white robes; and what hours the women must spend
in washing out of them the mud imparted daily by those terraced fields in
which their wearers laboured! The last touch of quaintness was given by
the men's diminutive top-hats of black glazed gauze which were held in
position on the crown of the head by a ribbon tied under the chin. . . .
Yes, the poor Koreans were a joke. ...

'Look at this scene at a country railway station where . . . the local
Japanese colony is seeing off the Japanese police-commandant and his
lady. . . . Where . . . are the Koreans ? For there is nobody visible on this
Korean platform except the Japanese colony and ourselves. O, there they
are, a whole crowd of them, herded behind a barrier in the background.
The expression, on their pathetic faces was not even faintly resentful. It
was wholly submissive. And, as I glanced from one row of faces to the
other, I felt as if I were a spectator of some comedy of manners, with the
Japanese playing "empire-builders" and the Koreans "ryots" or "falla-
hin". So the Koreans were Japan's Bengalis! And I could scarcely sup-
press an unmannerly guffaw as I suddenly thought of a colony of ants
bearing sway over their insect-cattle.*1

The wayfaring Occidental Philistine who had written these patro-
nizing words in A.D. 1929 had it is true, also written, in the same context,
that a 'ghostly music, audible all the time to the inward sense, would not
allow one to forget that', besides being a joke, the Koreans 'were a
tragedy'; and, in the light of an obvious analogy between Japanese rule
in Korea and a British Raj in India which, in A.D. 1929, was already in
process of liquidation, he had also foreseen the passing of a Japanese
ascendancy.

*As I strolled up and down that platform, looking at the scene that was
being played before me there, the inaudible music of the Korean landscape
began to develop a secondary theme, which was an elegy over the prospects
of Japanese dominion. While the overtones were still sounding the dirge
of Korea's national past, this undertone sang the transitoriness of all
insular conquests on Continental ground.'2

* Toynbee, Arnold J.: A Journey to China (London 1931, Constable), pp. 185-6.

* Ibid., p. 187.