Even one of the most fair-minded of guide-book writers speaks of the Koreans as “incredibly lazy”—proof that he saw much more of the old capital and its vacant-minded _yangbans_ than of the country districts. If he had ever toiled for a day in the blazing rice-fields, even driven a bull knee-deep in mud through them, or carried a “jiggy” load along the narrow paths between them, he might have been of a different opinion. In a land where agriculture is the national industry, where four-fifths of the population still remain living among and tilling the hills of their forefathers, their horizon bounded by their own narrow valley and the nearest market town, there can scarcely be general indolence. The Koreans in the mass are not lazy; but life means to them something more than incessant exertion merely for exertion’s sake, and they amble along even at work as if there were never any hurry to do anything or get anywhere, quite the antithesis of the busy little Japanese. With some such foot-note as this to one accusation against them, it is easy to agree with the man who put it so well, that the Koreans “are garrulous yet inarticulate, stolid yet excitable, frugal yet improvident, lazy yet lashed by necessity to strenuous efforts.” A childlike people on the whole, one is likely to conclude from weeks of wandering among them, happy-go-lucky, with little tendency of laying up for a rainy day, a trait in which they are widely at variance with their present rulers.
In June the peasants were still spreading over the fields the decomposed oak-leaves used as fertilizer, but by early July the transplanting of rice began, soon to be followed by the weeding. Gangs pull up the closely grown seedlings and tie them in bundles, which they throw out across the fields to be planted with an expertness which reminds one that their national pastime, at least in pre-Japanese days, was stone-throwing. The earth-laden roots being much the heavier end, the bundles unfailingly land upright just where the thrower chooses to place them. A line of six to a dozen men and women move slowly across each flooded field, replanting the grasses one by one, and everywhere the green, low, flat country is dotted with hundreds of near-white figures rooting in the soft, flooded earth. That no space may be wasted, beans are often planted on the tops of the dikes between the paddy-fields. Frogs sing their lugubrious chorus far and wide, little realizing the unwisdom of betraying themselves to the beautiful ibis which feed upon them. At weeding-time whole villages join together in great gangs, with drums, fifes, brass cans, and all manner of native noise-producers, to make a festival of the task, singing as they weed. The men, stripped to the waist and burned a permanent brown, display leathery skins that glisten red-brown in the sunshine, like a well polished russet shoe. Yet many a peasant uses a yellow fan as he works. Where irrigation calls for the lifting of water from a ditch to the fields, a man leisurely swings all day long an enormous wooden spoon suspended in a little framework. If the work calls for shoveling, one man holds the handle of the implement and two or three others lift it by the ropes attached to the shaft, precisely like the people of the Lebanon far across on the opposite edge of Asia. The Korean is famed for his kindness to his bulls, almost his only draft-animals now that his savage little stallion ponies have become so scarce, and it is the commonest of sights to meet a peasant lugging his wooden plow on his own broad back while the bull strolls lazily homeward before him.