“It is impossible to know whether these statements are true or false, but we feel certain that it is in Pyeng-yang, in the Church schools,—­in a certain college and a certain girls’ school—­in the compound of these foreigners.  Really this foreign community is very vile."[1]

     [Footnote 1:  Osaka Asahi, quoted in the Peking and Tientsin
     Times, March 38,1919.]

A veritable reign of terror was instituted.  There were wholesale arrests and the treatment of many of the people in prison was in keeping with the methods employed by the Japanese on the Conspiracy Trial victims.  The case of a little shoe boy aroused special indignation.  The Japanese thought that he knew something about the organization of the demonstration—­why they thought so, only those who can fathom the Japanese mind would venture to say—­so they beat and burned him almost to death to make him confess.  A lady missionary examined his body afterwards.  There were four scars, five inches long, where the flesh had been seared with a red-hot iron.  His hands had swollen to twice their normal size from beating, and the dead skin lay on the welts.  He had been kicked and beaten until he fainted.  Then they threw water over him and gave him water to drink until he recovered when he was again piled with questions and beaten with a bamboo rod until he collapsed.

Some of those released from prison after they had satisfied the Japanese of their innocence had dreadful tales to tell.  Sixty people were confined in a room fourteen by eight feet, where they had to stand up all the time, not being allowed to sit or lie down.  Eating and sleeping they stood leaning against one another.  The wants of nature had to be attended to by them as they stood.  The secretary of one of the mission schools was kept for seven days in this room, as part of sixteen days’ confinement, before he was released.

A student, arrested at his house, was kept at the police station for twenty days.  Then they let him go, having found nothing against him.  His bruised body when he came out showed what he had suffered.  He had been bound and a cord around his shoulders and arms pulled tight until the breastbone was forced forward and breathing almost stopped.  Then he was beaten with a bamboo stick on the shoulders and arms until he lost consciousness.  The bamboo stick was wrapped in paper so as to prevent the skin breaking and bleeding.  He saw another man beaten ten times into unconsciousness, and ten times brought round; and a boy thrown down hard on the floor and stamped on repeatedly until he lost consciousness.  Those who came out were few; what happened to those who remained within the prison must be left to the imagination.