KOREA: Rx for Corns

The Koreans’ native ability to grasp a homely fact is indicated in a line from one of their love songs:

Arirang, Arirang, my love is going over

Arirang mountain.

Before he has gone ten li, his feet will

hurt him.

It has not escaped most Koreans, after a year of marching into the era of peace and independence, that their feet are indeed hurting. For half a century they suffered under the hated Japanese. With “liberation” came a dream of freedom. But then their country was divided by two governments, the Russian in the north and the U.S. in the south; they did not have enough rice; angry mobs fomented violence. In four riotous days last week 59 Korean policemen were killed at Taegu in the U.S. zone; 60 were wounded and another 100 reported “missing.” Unsigned handbills in Seoul read: “Down with American Imperialism,” and “Why only one hop [handful] of rotten foreign corn? Corn is for horses in the United States. If death is inevitable, let us have a bowl of rice before it comes.”

Lieut, General John R. Hodge, commander of U.S. occupation forces, declared martial law for Kyongsang-Pukto Province. Communist agitators could find receptive audiences in some sectors of the U.S. zone. Monumentally ill-equipped at war’s end to occupy or govern Korea, the U.S. is still trying to live down initial errors: the bad feeling created by retaining Japanese police, however briefly, as a temporary control force (the Soviets booted them quickly and efficiently in the north) ; a willingness to string along with doddering Korean oldsters, instead of young, competent and popular leaders; the crowning fiasco of abandoning rice rationing, which soon resulted in a critical shortage, a black market and inflation. That the Russians were making mistakes, too, in the northern sector was evidenced by the thousands of Koreans attempting to flee to the south.

In Washington, Reparations Representative Ed Pauley prepared a report for President Truman recommending that the U.S. pull up its socks in Korea: as in Germany, there was no point in simply waiting for Russian cooperation on unified control of the country. Japanese reparations to Korea must be sped up, machinery moved into the U.S. zone of Korea and economic aid supplied, so that the whole area will develop into a unit capable of independent government. The U.S., said Pauley, has a clear opportunity and responsibility to demonstrate to Koreans that democracy will work better than Communism.