Season 13, Episode 19: The Question of Korea
We will begin today’s episode by stepping back, just a little, and discussing contemporary developments in the Korean Empire. The foundations of Korea’s empire had been spurred, in large part, by the assassination of Queen Min at the hands of Japanese assassins. In light of King Gojong’s elevation to Emperor Gojong, his late wife was posthumously elevated as well, and given the name “Empress Myeongseong.”
While attempting to rebrand the Joseon Kingdom as the Empire of Korea seemed like a good way to assert Korean independence in the face of the hostile imperial powers who surrounded them, its name would always be more of a concept than a reality. In fact, its early years were marked by a comparatively liberal atmosphere compared with Meiji Era Japan. Newspapers published stories and opinion pieces without fear of state censorship, protests and public gatherings were permitted, and liberal organizations were free to press for the enshrinement of civil rights. One of the more prominent of these groups was the Independence Club, who formed a body called the Junchuwon which served as a kind of shadow senate who made recommendations to the sovereign and his councillors. In the fall of 1898, they sent six requests to Emperor Gojong, which ranged from establishing a right to fair trial to empowering the imperial cabinet to veto some of the emperor’s appointees and they even recommended the establishment of a centralized taxation authority.
However, the liberal groups, especially the vocal Independence Club, soon came under fire from conservative opposition. These critics spread rumors that the liberal groups planned to overthrow the monarchy and in place of the Korean Empire establish the worst possible alternative: a democratic republic. Many of these critics were in positions of influence within the ad hoc imperial Korean government and they ensured that Emperor Gojong believed these rumors. He ordered the arrest of nearly all members of the Independence club - 17 out of 20 were soon confined to cells - and dismissed the ministers who had signed the document containing the six requests in agreement. Shortly thereafter, the Emperor issued an official decree disbanding the Independence Club and other liberal groups.
Like the Tsars of Russia, Emperor Gojong felt it necessary to choose between a liberal path and a conservative one and, like Nicholas II, he chose the conservative path. Over the next few years, taxes which had been abolished by the Gabo Reforms would be reinstated in the name of enabling the state to make necessary changes to the nation. The reforms which resulted were largely focused around establishing land ownership, sending Korean students overseas to learn necessary skills to assist in modernizing the country, and, critically, reforming the Korean Army.
Two years after the Empire was declared, they promulgated a constitution which established their fledgling nation as a constitutional monarchy. The document was structured to essentially vest almost all political power to the sovereign, which frequently led to Emperor Gojong overruling the various councils tasked with leading various parts of the nation and even forcing through certain reforms even when only a minority of councillors supported them.
However, in spite of their alleged independence, the Korean Empire continued to live in the shadow of the Russian Empire, who acted in various capacities as their patron. Trade agreements with Russia meant a fairly regular outflow of Korean raw materials and while they were happy to accept Russian help with military reform, they often expelled Russian officers for disrespectful behavior.
From Russia’s end, Tsar Nicholas II appears to have had only an extremely vague idea about what to do with Korea. He did not want to colonize it outright, kind of wanted it to be a protectorate, but was reluctant to take on additional responsibilities as an official protector. The Tsar commented to a cousin in 1901 that he did not want to seize Korea but likewise he could not allow Japan to seize it either.
Shortly after establishing themselves as an independent state, the Korean Empire sought official recognition from many foreign nations, especially western imperial powers. As tensions rose between Japan and Russia, the Korean Empire sought to establish its own neutrality, partly as a way of gaining status in the international community and hopefully achieving recognition as an equal. We already know, roughly, what happened next - Japan and Russia fought a war and while both sides nearly bankrupted themselves it was Japan who ultimately won, even if their nationalist citizens were displeased with the treaty of Portsmouth.
Japan had used Korea as a means of transporting troops to the various fronts they had been maintaining in Manchuria. While the ink was still drying on the Treaty of Portsmouth, Ito Hirobumi moved to secure Korea for Japan’s future ambitions. In November of 1905, he arrived in Hanseong and delivered a letter to Emperor Gojong from Emperor Meiji. He also delivered a demand: sign the treaty or else very bad things are about to happen.
This incident in 1905 was the first step in a process which would end with Korea’s annexation five years later. To modern Korean nationalists, it is just another in a long line of examples of the Japanese behaving as bullies toward their peninsular neighbors. While it is not my intention to exonerate or justify Japan’s seizure of Korean sovereignty, I find it helpful to understand historical events within their proper context.
The material conditions within the Empire of Korea were fairly grim in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One European traveler during that period described Korea as a land consisting of “the robbers and the robbed,” which fairly succinctly describes the relationship between its people and their government. The late Joseon Kingdom suffered under the weight of normalized corruption among government officials, and the establishment of an impressive-sounding “empire” did little to remediate this situation.
Events like the Donghak Rebellion ably demonstrate just how displeased many of the common Koreans were with their rather predatory government, but their demanded reforms were adopted on paper and then largely ignored by the very petty officials who continued their high-handed extraction. However, to just pin the blame on corrupt lower-level scholar officials does not accurately describe the level of corruption endemic to Emperor Gojong’s government.
In a manner similar to that of Qing Dynasty China, money which was intended to fund the modernization of infrastructure, military, and economy was often siphoned and skimmed at nearly every level of official distribution, starting at the top. Foreign advisors, whom the empire hired to assist in this effort, were often frustrated by the sheer massive scope of graft present in the Korean Empire’s upper echelons. Once in a while, one of these advisors would convince Emperor Gojong to dismiss one or several of his cabinet ministers. Such dismissals were really just reassignments to different ministries where the potential for graft was just as high. One foreign advisor compared this situation to a deck of cards which contained more than the usual number of face cards: no matter how many times such a deck was shuffled, the same knaves appeared in every hand.
A corrupt but militarily weak government exploiting a discontented population is generally a recipe for revolution, foreign intervention, or some combination thereof. From the perspective of the Japanese imperial government, they had already nearly lost their influence over the Korean peninsula in 1897. They were not about to risk losing that influence again.
While Emperor Gojong had initially maintained Korea’s neutrality, during the course of the Russo-Japanese War he had eventually bowed to pressure, ably applied by the presence of thousands of Japanese troops on his soil, to cut diplomatic ties with the Russian Empire. In 1905, with the war over and Japan triumphant, there would be no flight to the Russian Embassy for the beleaguered Emperor Gojong. With his palace surrounded by armed Japanese troops, in 1905 he signed the treaty proffered by Ito Hirobumi.
The Eulsa Treaty, named for the Korean zodiac term for the year, officially made Korea a protectorate of Japan. Specifically, all foreign policy for Korea was placed under Japan’s jurisdiction, and it granted the Japanese government special supervisory control over their trade. It also created a new high office: the Japanese Resident-General of Korea. The first to serve in this office was none other than Ito Hirobumi.
While the Eulsa Treaty was not an outright annexation, it was a stark surrender of national sovereignty and the Korean government saw it as a humiliating development. Two of Emperor Gojong’s chief ministers committed suicide in protest and the emperor himself launched a campaign which attempted to gain foreign support for Korean sovereignty and push back against Japan’s coercive domination.
In a span of about two years, Emperor Gojong sent letters to seventeen heads of state throughout the world, including the president of France, the king of England, and the Emperor of China among many others. These correspondences received no reply, nor did any world powers seem to object to Japan’s patronage of Korea. In 1907, an opportunity presented itself as many of the world powers were gathering for the Second Hague Convention and Emperor Gojong managed to send three official ambassadors to hopefully address the convention’s attendants and convince them to push back against Japanese expansion and re-establish Korea’s independence and sovereignty.
This may not have been quite as big a reach as it sounds on first blush. Korea had sent official representatives to the first Hague Convention in 1899, as it was still considered an independent nation at the time. However, their request to address the many gathered officials of various world powers was denied and the convention instead focused on disarmament and preventing another war on European soil.
In response to Emperor Gojong’s attempted undermining of their peninsular adventures, the Meiji government forced his abdication in the summer of 1907, elevating his son Sunjong as Emperor Yunghui. Six days later, however, the new emperor was coerced into signing a new treaty with Japan. This new agreement placed Korea’s domestic policy under the authority of the Japanese Resident-General, absorbing yet another chunk of the Korean government’s sovereignty.
The Japanese Resident-General of Korea now had the power to form his own executive cabinet who would decide domestic policies on behalf of the Korean people. It also allowed him to reform the peninsula’s army and establish a new justice system complete with courts of various ranks. It was also very clear that the only candidates for high office in Korea must be Japanese. Locals need not apply.
The new Japanese government of Korea was a large bureaucracy bent on modernization and building capital infrastructure. In fact, it looked awfully similar to the Meiji government itself, something which was hardly coincidental. This gradual takeover of the Korean peninsula was, to be clear, not accomplished without violent repression but reducing it to violent repression alone is also not entirely correct.
The hard truth about Korea as it existed in the early 1900s is that its people had very little national political unity and a significant portion of its population initially welcomed the Japanese takeover of their government. Well-informed Koreans realized that Japan was rapidly gaining something close to equality with western imperial powers, both militarily and economically. The years between the proclamation of the Empire of Korea and the end of the Russo-Japanese War had been defined by a persistently corrupt government whose efforts at modernization and reform had made almost no impact on the broader peninsular economy and culture. Even particularly nationalistic Koreans who hated the Japanese might have, by 1905, felt some relief that even if the Japanese government was getting a little grabby, at least someone was taking charge.
One group in Korea who did seem largely glad to have Japan’s guiding imperial hand gradually strengthen its grip was foreign Christian missionaries. Although Japan was not generally friendly toward Christianity, there was some hope that they would protect missionary efforts from competing local groups like Donghak leaders and other locals hostile to Christian evangelism.
Not all the missionaries, however, were content to welcome Japanese interference and essentially support the colonial subjugation of those to whom they were supposedly ministering. An American missionary named Homer Hulbert had been working in Korea since 1886, initially teaching at the Royal English School, educating the children of Emperor Gojong and his courtiers. The emperor eventually charged him with creating a western-style middle school for young adolescents continuing their education. During the years of the Empire of Korea, Hulbert disliked Russian influence over Korea’s government because he saw the Russian Empire as a fundamentally backward and reactionary force. He actually favored the Japanese, believing that they would better aid in Korea’s modernization. However, after the forced signing of the Eulsa Treaty in the fall of 1905, he rapidly grew disillusioned with Japanese occupation.
Hulbert’s particular gripe was with the Japanese government’s preference for secular solutions rather than faith-based enterprises. In many east Asian countries, Christian missionaries had been allowed to build entirely new school systems which replaced the existing education systems within those countries. Hulbert’s own success in creating a middle school and personally educating the children of Korea’s elite was certainly a motivating factor for his sudden desire to support Korea’s independence.
When Emperor Gojong sent a secret band of representatives to the Hague Convention, Homer Hulbert was one of them. However, even he, a Christian missionary from a western nation, was unable to convince the nations gathered to hear the case for Korean independence. One of the hard truths about Korea’s gradual decline into a Japanese colony was that no other nation really wanted the responsibility, not to mention the added expenditure, of butting heads with Japan over their neighboring peninsula.
More than a little racism motivated the decision by the western nations to allow Japan to annex their neighbors. Western travelers in the late 1800s/early 1900s who toured east Asia often wrote fond, loving accounts of the beauty to be found in China and Japan while cursing almost every minute they had to spend in Korea. Traveling through the peninsula was often dangerous, inconvenient, and offered only spartan accommodations compared to the luxury hotels and other new establishments of China and Japan. The publications of some of these travelogues in western newspapers and magazines led most informed readers to conclude that China was okay, Japan was well on its way up, and Korea remained a backward nation of superstition, xenophobia, and mismanagement. Race scientists of the day began to theorize that the Japanese were the most superior of the east Asian peoples, putting the Chinese in the second tier and often ranking Koreans way at the bottom.
As you might guess, this flavor of racism was avidly adopted and championed by more than a few Japanese nationalists. By the early 1900s, kokugaku teachings, which proclaimed that Japan was the land of the gods and enjoyed the special favor of said gods, was promoted by the government and readily taught to school children throughout Japan. Considering the relative upward trajectory of Japan throughout the first thirty years of the Meiji Period, it is easy to see how their present circumstances in the early 1900s was easy proof that they were indeed favored by the gods.
A development which concerned a significant segment of Japan’s civilian leadership was the persistent and increasing influence of the military in government affairs. One political leader who was particularly concerned was Saionji Kinmochi, who was made Prime Minister after the retirement of Katsura Taro. Kinmochi frequently butted heads with Yamagata Aritomo, the father of the Imperial Japanese Army. They disagreed on fundamental issues like the existence of political parties — Kinmochi and most of his peers believed that parties were a necessary part of the machinery of the modern state while Aritomo would have preferred to abolish them entirely.
While he no doubt felt a level of satisfaction at replacing Taro, who was his longtime rival, Saionji Kinmochi had an unfortunate task ahead of him: cleaning up his predecessor’s mess. Katsura Taro had likely done the best he could at managing the budget and expenditure required to support the Russo-Japanese War but now the foreign loan from the United States needed to be paid back and expenditures brought into alignment with increasingly meager tax revenues.
Believe it or not, decisions about government expenditure can sometimes get very heated. Elected officials are expected to deliver for their electorates, and the electorate of Japan had just gotten larger. Previously only men paying an annual tax of 15 yen or more were qualified to vote, but in 1900 that requirement was lowered to 10 yen. The diet was expanded from 253 seats to 376 and the electoral system also reformed to something more closely resembling parliamentary elections in England. Although this meant that, for all practical purposes, the electorate had grown from 1% of the population to a whopping 2%, doubling the number of voters meant balancing twice the usual number of interests, demands, and petitions.
The ensuing attempts by the Diet to balance various demands of their constituencies with excruciatingly strained finances were largely miserable failures. Heated sessions only served to cement rivalries between diet members and increase hostility between the various political parties and their patrons. In the midst of this bitter infighting, the military was demanding massive funding for replenishment, support for the Korean occupation, and even increased expansion.
Thrown into this already volatile mix of political mudslinging and resource allocation was an increasing fear among conservative elites about the encroachment of new political philosophies: Marxism and Socialism. Last episode, we discussed how the Hibiya Riots were largely led by working-class Japanese and how this caused alarm bells to go off among the political elite. There’s no evidence that socialists or marxists of any stripe were behind the Hibiya Riots but for some leaders, any organization among laborers was evidence that a violent worker revolution was right around the corner. However, during the tenure of Saionji Kinmochi there was an incident which gave some credibility to conservative concerns about the spread of Marxism. We’ll discuss that incident and an even larger one that followed in greater detail in the next episode.
Yamagata Aritomo used fears of a red uprising to argue for increasing funds for military usage, arguing that the army would be absolutely critical to prevent a violent Marxist overthrow. He and his allies argued that the government’s response to the Hibiya Riots had been insufficiently punitive to guard against future such actions of mass violence. Fears of future Marxist violence was enough to galvanize his fellow conservatives into open opposition against Saionji Kinmochi. After two and a half exhausting years of arguing for a reduction of military power in the name of fiscal responsibilities, Kinmochi resigned in frustration in July of 1908 and was replaced by Katsura Taro.
The feuding between Katsura Taro and Saionji Kinmochi was an extension of the rivalry between the two dominant factions among the higher leadership. Ito Hirobumi led the more civilian and constitutional faction and Saionji Kinmochi was his protege. Yamagata Aritomo led the more militant and emperor-centric faction and Katsura Taro was his protege. The back-and-forth would continue for some time to come, and in many ways the dynamic between the more civilian and more military factions would define Japanese politics well into the next several decades and, arguably, beyond.
Meanwhile, in Korea, resistance had been building against Japanese domination. Across the peninsula, Uibyeong, or “Righteous Armies,” were beginning to form militias dedicated to disrupting Japanese armed forces which occupied their country. These groups were disparate and had little coordination between them and they had extremely different motivations for resisting Japanese colonization. Some wanted to restore Emperor Gojong or at least restore national sovereignty under the sitting Emperor Sunjong. Others wanted to establish an entirely new dynasty, or to create a new government centered around Donghak spirituality and philosophy. Most Koreans, during the early phases of Japan’s expansion, did little to resist but merely kept their heads down and hoped everything would work out.
After 1907 and Japan’s seizure of domestic policy and establishment of a miniature Meiji government made up exclusively of Japanese bureaucrats, violence appeared to many Koreans to be the only option remaining. Independence activists began organizing protests and some of them even acquired weapons and prepared to fight.
Anti-Japanese sentiment rose dramatically in early 1909 when news broke that Japan planned to implement a full annexation of their peninsular neighbors. Many Koreans who had previously welcomed the Japanese as a stabilizing force began to have second thoughts, especially considering how rapidly Koreans themselves were being relegated to a status as second-class citizens among their managerial Japanese overlords.
On October 26, 1909, nationalists managed to score a kill on an extremely high-value target. As he stepped off the train at Harbin railway station on his way to meet with a Russian representative, the Japanese Resident-General Ito Hirobumi was approached by An Jung-geun, a Korean nationalist. Jung-geun pulled his revolver and fired all six shots at Hirobumi, striking him three times in the chest. Soon afterward, Ito Hirobumi died of his wounds while his assassin was placed under arrest.
Although Korea would be fully annexed into the Japanese Empire the following year, this imperial project had cost the Japanese government one of its early luminaries and national heroes. Next time, we will discuss the final years of the Meiji Period, the further developments of Korea under their governance, and the return of Saionji Kinmochi, who would once more become the Prime Minister of the Empire of Japan.