ce 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 thei