The police and gendarmerie generally were not so merciful as this particular Chief.  The rule in many police stations was to strip and beat the girls and young women who took any part in the demonstrations, and to expose them, absolutely naked, to as many Japanese men as possible.  The Korean woman is as sensitive as a white woman about the display of her person, and the Japanese, knowing this, delighted to have this means of humiliating them.  In some towns, the schoolgirls arranged to go out in sections, so many one day, so many on the other.  The girls who had to go out on the later days knew how those who had preceded them had been stripped and beaten.  Anticipating that they would be treated in the same way, they sat up the night before sewing special undergarments on themselves, which would not be so easily removed as their ordinary clothes, hoping that they might thus avoid being stripped entirely naked.

The girls were most active of all in the city of Seoul.  I have mentioned in the previous chapter the arrest of many of them.  They were treated very badly indeed.  Take, for instance, the case of those seized by the police on the morning of Wednesday, March 5th.  They were nearly all of them pupils from the local academies.  Some of them were demonstrating on Chong-no, the main street, shouting “Mansei.”  Others were wearing straw shoes, a sign of mourning, for the dead Emperor.  Still others were arrested because the police thought that they might be on the way to demonstrate.  A few of these girls were released after a spell in prison.  On their release, their statements concerning their treatment were independently recorded.

They were first taken to the Chong-no Police Station, where a body of about twenty Japanese policemen kicked them with their heavy boots, slapped their cheeks or punched their heads.  “They flung me against a wall with all their might, so that I was knocked senseless, and remained so for a time,” said one.  “They struck me such blows across the ears that my cheeks swelled up,” said another.  “They trampled on my feet with their heavy nailed boots till I felt as though my toes were crushed beneath them....  There was a great crowd of students, both girls and boys.  They slapped the girls over the ears, kicked them, and tumbled them in the corners.  Some of them they took by the hair, jerking both sides of the face.  Some of the boy students they fastened down with a rope till they had their heads fastened between their legs.  Then they trampled them with their heavy boots, kicking them in their faces till their eyes were swelled and blood flowed.”

Seventy-five persons, forty men and thirty-five girls, were confined in a small room.  The door was closed, and the atmosphere soon became dreadful.  In vain they pleaded to have the door open.  The girls were left until midnight without food or water.  The men were removed at about ten in the evening.

During the day, the prisoners were taken one by one before police officials to be examined.  Here is the narrative of one of the schoolgirls.  This girl was dazed and almost unconscious from ill-treatment and the poisoned air, when she was dragged before her inquisitor.