The Westernization of Korea

"We weep over old Korea, a victim, not so much of political agencies, as of the social and intellectual revolution that has come from the west," wrote protestant scholar-missionary James Scarth Gale in the late 1920s, quoted by a Maryknoller in Korea — The More They Stay the Same. He continued:

We have unwittingly brought about the destruction of East Asia, in which Korea is involved. To her the west evidently does as it pleases, why should she not? The west has no barriers between the sexes, why should she have? In everything that she has seen of the west, religion counts as nothing: why should she bother about it? Labor-unionism, communism, socialism, Bolshevism, and anarchism express the real mind of the western nations; why should she not take them up and be the same? Why should she sing in falsetto when the west sings with the whole throat wide open... . Why not go whirling off for joy-rides, boys and girls? Why not be divorced at pleasure? Why not be up-to-date as the west is up-to-date? This wild dream... well expresses the mind of the advanced youth of the city of Seoul in these days of confusion.

Let us glance once more at the Korea that is gone, "the land of the superior man," as China long ago called her; land of the scholar, land of the book and writing-brush, land of the beautiful vase and polished mirror; land of rarest, choicest fabrics; land of poems and painted pictures; land of the filial son, the devoted wife, the loyal courier; land of the hermit, the deeply religious seer whose final goal was God.