Virginia Review of Asian Studies
SCHOLARLY NOTES
JACK LONDON’S SYMPATHETIC PORTRAIT OF KOREA1
Daniel A. Métraux
Mary Baldwin College
Korea, long known as the “Hermit Kingdom,” has a long, proud and distinguished cultural
history, but by the late nineteenth century it was a very weak and backward state totally
dependent on a vastly weakened China for its protection and livelihood. When the West began
its late 1800s drive to control the whole of Asia and a recently modernized Meiji Japan joined
the imperialist clique, Korea sought to protect itself by hiding from the rest of the world. While
most of the major powers were content to largely ignore Korea, two of its closest neighbors,
Japan and Russia, both coveted the Korean Peninsula and soon became engaged in the first major
conflict of the twentieth century to see which of them would end up controlling it.
Western journalists rushed to Japan to cover the conflict. One of these reporters was a
highly successful novelist, Jack London (1876-1916) who represented the Hearst newspapers in
the United States. By sheer determination London became the premier American journalist
reporting the early stages of the Russo-Japanese War. Ignoring regulations imposed by the
Japanese military forbidding Western journalists access to the Tokyo’s military on the Asian
mainland, London sneaked into Korea and followed the Japanese army from early February
through June 1904 as it marched through the Hermit Kingdom to its encounter with Russian
forces entrenched in Manchuria along the Yalu River. London sent 22 dispatches and many
photographs to the Hearst newspapers. Since there was little military action to report until later
that spring, London, a very gifted ethnological observer, focused much of his attention on what
he saw in Korea. He made many comments on Korean society, culture, and politics, much of it
very negative in tone. Any reader without any knowledge of Korea would come away with a
very negative view of Korea based on what she/he read in London’s work.
As a student of Korean history and culture, the goal of this reseasrch is to
analyze London’s portrayal of Korea to determine the validity and accuracy of London’s writing
and photography. Would I the reader in 1904-1905 come away with a realistic conception of
what Jack London was saying about Korea at that time? Was London biased against Korea and
1
First published in the Spring 2013 Issue of The Call of the Jack London Society.
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Koreans or was he reflecting reality? Did London show any racial prejudice against the Koreans
and how accurate were his comparisons between Chinese, Japanese and Korean civilizations at
that time?
Before the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) there was very little written in the West
about Korea. Homer B. Hulbert’s 1906 The Passing of Korea provides a remarkably in-depth
view of traditional Korea, but it probably had a limited readership. Isabella Bird’s 1889 Korea
and Her Neighbors gives a vivid picture of every day life in Korea and was read by London
during or after his sojourn there. There were a few other noteworthy books, but the general
public had no concrete view of Korea. London’s extensive feature writing about Korea reached
a wide audience and most probably planted a view of Korea in the minds of many of his readers.
London’s Critical View of Korea and Koreans
London wrote numerous reports as he traveled from Seoul to Manchuria where he offered
his in-depth analyses of Koreans, Japanese and Chinese. London was writing in an era when
many of his fellow Californians had developed a strong sense of racial prejudice against Asians,
especially those Japanese and Chinese immigrants who had settled in the San Francisco area and
elsewhere. London on occasion reflected some of these prejudices in his novels and essays,
especially when he was writing about Koreans, but he more often shows genuine sympathy and
respect for the Asians he encountered. His essays focus on matters of human interest and
depictions of the misery of Koreans reminds one very much of his book, People of the Abyss,
about the poor of London’s East End.
In that sense, most of London’s writing differs greatly from the anti-Asian diatribes found
in many newspaper articles and books of the period. London had little faith in the ability of
Koreans to save their nation, but was full of praise for the Japanese and Chinese whose rise he
predicted in his early writings:
The menace to the western world lies not in the little brown man [the Japanese], but in
the four hundred millions of yellow men should the little brown man undertake their
management. The Chinese is not dead to new ideas; he is an efficient worker; makes a
good soldier, and is wealthy in the essential materials of a machine age. Under a capable
management, he will go far. The Japanese is prepared and fit to undertake this
management.
One of London’s first dispatches in early March 1904 belittled the Koreans:
A stalwart race are the Koreans, well muscled and towering above their masters, the
[Japanese] “dwarfs” who conquered them of old time and who look upon them today
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with the eyes of possession. But the Korean is spiritless. He lacks the dash of Malay
which makes the Japanese soldier what he is.
The Korean has finer features, but the vital lack in his face is strength. He is soft and
effeminate when compared with the strong breeds, and whatever strength has been his in
the past has been worked out of him by centuries of corrupt government. He is certainly
the most inefficient of human creatures, lacking all initiative and achievement, and the
only thing in which he shines is the carrying of burdens on his back. As a draught animal
and packhorse he is a success.
London developed an even more damning view of Koreans by the time he reached Manchuria in
June 1904:
War is to-day the final arbiter in the affairs of men, and it is as yet the final test of the
worth-whileness of peoples. Tested thus, the Korean fails. He lacks the nerve to remain
when a strange army crosses his land. The few goods and chattels he may have managed
to accumulate he puts on his back, along with his doors and windows, and away he heads
for his mountain fastnesses. Later he may return, sans goods, chattels, doors, and
windows, impelled by insatiable curiosity for a “look see.” But it is curiosity merely—a
timid, deerlike curiosity. He is prepared to bound away on his long legs at the first hint of
danger or trouble.
Northern Korea was a desolate land when the Japanese passed through. Villages and
towns were deserted. The fields lay untouched. There was no ploughing nor sowing, no
green things growing. Little or nothing was to be purchased. One carried one’s own food
with him and food for horses and servants was the anxious problem that waited at the
day’s end. In many a lonely village not an ounce nor a grain of anything could be bought,
and yet there might be standing around scores of white-garmented, stalwart Koreans,
smoking yard-long pipes and chattering, chattering—ceaselessly chattering. Love,
money, or force could not procure from them a horseshoe or a horseshoe nail...They have
splendid vigour and fine bodies, but they are accustomed to being beaten and robbed
without protest or resistance by every chance foreigner who enters their country.
London wrote about the material poverty of the Korean people. He especially disliked the
yangban aristocracy which he claimed to be ruthless in its suppression of the Korean people. He
gives several examples where the Japanese would pay for food and supplies taken from a Korean
village. The local aristocrat would collect the money from the Japanese, but would only give
around a quarter to the villages, pocketing the rest for himself. At one point London angrily
denounces a Korean aristocrat, Pak-Choon-Song, blaming him and the rest of his class for the
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harrowing suffering and poverty of the common people of Korea. The poverty of the people and
the weakness and backward state of the nation are due to this exploitation.
Some of London’s most compelling articles and photographs from the war are of Korean
refugees, dressed in white, showing the devastating plight of war on civilians. One is
particularly impressed by a very poignant description of a young girl, perhaps no more than six
or seven, carrying a younger sister on her back, a bandage covering the younger girl’s head, a
terrible worried expression on her sister’s face.
Isabella Bird’s Critical Views of Korea
London’s views of Korea are hardly unique. Other Western writers of the period
reported very similar impressions of the Hermit Kingdom. Isabella Bird, the intrepid British
travel writer who spent the late 1880s traveling throughout northern China, Korea and eastern
Siberia, came up with very similar opinions about Korea:
I sat amidst the dirt, squalor, rubbish, and odd-and-endism of the inn yard before starting,
surrounded by an apathetic, dirty, vacant-looking, open-mouthed crowd steeped in poverty, I
felt Korea to be hopeless, helpless, pitiable, piteous, a mere shuttlecock of certain great powers,
and that there is no hope for her population of twelve or fourteen millions.
Bird like London placed the blame for Korea’s poverty and the obvious insecurity of the Korean
people on their allegedly corrupt and menacing aristocratic yangban class. The yangban
ruthlessly exploited the people, cheating them out of any wealth they might acquire. They also
persecuted the common people said Bird, depriving them of any rights and taking away any
pleasures they might have in life. On the other hand, when Bird crossed the border from
northern Korea into eastern Siberia, she encountered Korean refugee communities that lacked
any yangban presence. Here she said the peasant Koreans thrived in relative freedom. They
lived in clean prosperous villages and had an air of confidence that both she and London had
found totally lacking in Korea proper:
Travellers are much impressed with the laziness of the Koreans, but after seeing their energy and
industry in Russian Manchuria, their thrift, and the abundant and comfortable furnishings of their
houses, I greatly doubt whether it is to be regarded as a matter of terperament. Every man in
Korea knows that poverty is his best security, and that anything he possesses beyond that which
provides himself and his family with food and clothing is certain to be taken from him by
voracious and corrupt officials. It is only when the exactions of officials become absolutely
intolerable and encroach upon his means of providing the necessaries of life that he resorts to the
only method of redress in his power, which has a sort of counterpart in China. This consists in
driving out, and occasionally in killing, the obnoxious and intolerable magistrate, or, as in a case
which lately gained much notoriety, roasting his favourite secretary on a wood pile. The popular
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outburst, though under unusual provocation it may culminate in deeds of regrettable violence, is
usually founded on right, and is an effective protest.
Among the modes of squeezing are forced labour, doubling or trebling the amount of a legitimate
tax, exacting bribes in cases of litigation, forced loans, etc. If a man is reported to have saved a
little money, an official asks for the loan of it. If it is granted, the lender frequently never sees
principal or interest; if it is refused, he is arrested, thrown into prison on some charge invented for
his destruction, and beaten until either he or his relations for him produce the sum demanded. To
such an extent are these demands carried, that in Northern Korea, where the winters are fairly
severe, the peasants, when the harvest has left them with a few thousand cash, put them in a hole
in the ground, and pour water into it, the frozen mass which results being then kindliness of the
Chinese peasant women. Their clothing is extremely dirty, as if the men had a monopoly of their
ceaseless laundry work, which everywhere goes on far into the night. Every brook-side has its
laundresses squatting on flat stones, dipping the soiled clothes in the water, laying them on flat
stones in tightly-rolled bundles earthed over, when it is fairly safe both from officials and thieves.
Korea is not necessarily a poor country. Her resources are undeveloped, not exhausted….On the
other hand, the energies of her people lie dormant. The upper classes, paralysed by the most
absurd of social obligations, spend their lives in inactivity. To the middle class no careers are
open; there are no skilled occupations to which they can turn their energies. The lower classes
work no harder than is necessary to keep the wolf from the door, for very sufficient reasons.
Even in Seoul, the largest mercantile establishments have hardly risen to the level of
shops. Everything in Korea has been on a low, poor, mean level. Class privileges, class and
official exactions, a total absence of justice, the insecurity of all earnings, a Government which
has carried out the worst traditions on which all unreformed Oriental Governments are based, a
class of official robbers steeped in intrigue, a monarch enfeebled by the seclusion of the palace
and the pettinesses of the Seraglio, a close alliance with one of the most corrupt of empires, the
mutual jealousies of interested foreigner, and an all-pervading and terrorizing superstition have
done their best to reduce Korea to that condition of resourcelessness and dreary squalor in which I
formed my first impression of her. Nevertheless the resources are there, in her seas, her soil, and
her hardy population.
A great and universal curse in Korea is the habit in which thousands of able-bodied men indulge
of hanging, or “sorning,” on relations or friends who are better off than themselves. There is no
shame in the transaction, and there is no public opinion to condemn it. A man who has a certain
income, however small, has to support many of his own kindred, his wife’s relations, many of his
own friends, and the friends of his relatives. This partly explains the rush for Government
offices, and their position as marketable commodities. To a man burdened with a horde of
hangers-on, the one avenue of escape is official life, which whether high or low, enables him to
provide for them out of the public purse. This accounts for the continual creation of offices, with
no other real object than the pensioning of the relatives and friends of the men who rule the
country. Above all, this explains the frequency of conspiracies and small revolutions in Korea.
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Principle is rarely at stake, and no Korean revolutionist intends to risk his life in support of any
conviction.
Jack London’s comments on Koreans may sound unkind to the modern reader, but they
are an accurate reflection of what he saw and experienced. The same is true with his
photography. London, who was as able a photographer as he was a writer, readily captured the
poverty of the land and the sad expressions of its people. There is little difference in the
depiction of Korea and its people in his writing and that of Isabella Bird or other Western or
Japanese writers who traveled through Korea.
London was a gifted ethnologist as well as a brilliant journalist and novelist. His brilliant
depiction of the people of East London in his celebrated book People of the Abyss certainly
develops the utter misery and sense of hopelessness of the residents of this unfortunate quarter.
Critics celebrate London’s exposure of the miserable state of life in London, then the wealthiest
city in the world, but he is accused of racism and of insensitivity towards Koreans when he
presents them in a negative light in his war articles from Korea and Manchuria.
I would argue that London was very sensitive to the plight of Koreans. He had read
Bird’s book before going to Korea and therefore knew what to expect there. Yet although he
reaches the same conclusions as to the cause of the misery of the Korean people –their
exploitation by the domineering aristocratic class—his conclusions are his own and are based on
his own experiences. The truth is that the common man in Korea did lead a miserable and
exploited life, that Seoul and other towns and villages throughout Korea were impoverished and
filthy, and that the commoner in Korea had a deep ingrained sense of insecurity that caused him
to flee any potential trouble. London’s depictions of Korea are as honest and forthright as those
of the downtrodden folks of London’s East End who appear in London’s People of the Abyss.
London once again brings us his views of Korea in one of his last major novels, The Star
Rover. Several critics say that London has reversed his views on Korea in this book when
compared to his war writing a decade earlier, but I would dispute this point. London does indeed
show a more positive view of Korean history and culture, especially in the virtuous character of
the heroine, Lady Om. But at the same time we get a scathing view of Korea’s aristocracy and
its exploitation of the commoner in Korea. London draws on much of his own experiences in
Korea for his views expressed in this famous chapter in The Star Rover.
Many critics have depicted London as a racist, but while he may have harbored some of
the racist views prevalent in the West at the turn of the last century, he also had a great deal of
respect for the people of East Asia including Koreans. He very accurately depicted their
hardships and misery, but was not necessarily trying to single them out for criticism.
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