Labrador looks at the Orient : notes of travel in the Near and the Far East / by Sir Wilfred Thomas Grenfell.

  • Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940.
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Labrador looks at the Orient : notes of travel in the Near and the Far East / by Sir Wilfred Thomas Grenfell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    asset to her Empire by making over almost every condition and institution in it. In May—1924—at Mukden on the Japanese side of the border, we entered our first Korean train. It was splendid, punctual, clean, comfortable, and the rates by no means exorbitant. The roadbed was good; and in travelling the whole length of the country, we could not but realize what a new era this one creation alone of the Japanese management must portend. As we watched the countryside flitting past, by far the most striking feature was the never-ending panorama of hill-sides and valleys in a glorious covering of green, an almost entirely new dress given them by the Japanese, who seem to surpass all the world in tree planting. The Koreans, we were told, made a great effort entirely to denude their country of trees before the Japanese took it over, quite for¬ getting that they themselves would still have to live in it, and farm it. But really the poverty induced by tyranny for ages had prevented the people from saving their invaluable forests. Some of these forests were on such precipitous slopes that it was hard to understand how they retained their hold, but even where they had slipped down en masse, the busy little people were now rapidly replanting them. In the first year they had planted twenty-five million trees. It was an amazing and an inspiring spectacle. So far as we could discern, if the histories of the past were correct, conditions in practically every line of life were im¬ proving, and rapidly, though wages were still little more than half those in Japan, while salaries of officials were the same in Japan and Korea. The Japanese have been accom¬ plishing for the crafts, industries, and finances what they had been doing so obviously for the trees and the countryside. Leaders of medical and other missions whom we met, and who had been in the country before the annexation, were very silent. Hospitals had treated many Koreans, badly beaten up by soldiers and even by military authorities in the