(7) Japan’s Hirobumi Ito laid groundwork for annexing Korea

Hirobumi Ito, left, rides a carriage in this undated file photo. He played an important part as Japan forced Korea to sign the protectorate treaty in 1905 and later he became governor general. / Korea Times

By Andrew Salmon

Oct. 26, 1909, Harbin Railway Station, Manchuria. A distinguished-looking, bearded Japanese, accompanied by a delegation of his own nationals, steps from the train and onto the platform.

Awaiting him stands a Russian delegation. As the be-coated gentlemen raise their hats to one another — these delegations are composed of men of affairs —nobody notices the approach of a lone figure: a young man in a dark suit.

The young man draws a pistol, aims and opens fire at the Japanese delegation. Men go down.

The bearded man, hit by three bullets, falls mortally wounded. He is Marquis Hirobumi Ito, former prime minister of Japan, former resident-general of Korea, and still a key figure in Japanese diplomacy.

The gunman makes no attempt to escape, but waving a flag, calls for his nation’s independence. “I have ventured to commit a serious crime, offering my life for my country,” says the shooter, a Korean named Ahn Jung-geun. “This is the behavior of a noble-minded patriot.” He is arrested.

The events above are broadly agreed upon by both Korean and Japanese sources but after those few brief seconds of action, the narratives, as is the case with so many incidents relating to this era, begin to diverge.

Bullets kill, but rarely instantly. Korean sources, including some quoted in this newspaper, state that Ito left no final words.

Japanese sources differ. As he lay bleeding on the platform, these sources state, Ito asked the identity of his assassin. When told, the dying man gasped, “The fool!”

Samurai, cosmopolitan, reformer, premier

Hirobumi Ito was born into a minor samurai family in 1841. In his youth, he was a firebrand: Like many poor samurai, he joined the movement to “Revere the emperor and expel the barbarians” (i.e. foreigners) and took part in an attack on the British consulate.

But his thinking changed. In 1863 he was one of the “Choshu Five,” young men who secretly and illegally left Japan under the sponsorship of Hong Kong-based trading house Jardine Matheson to study in England. The Japanese worked their passage westward aboard a steamship and attended University College in London.

For a young man from an Asian nation that was only just emerging from something close to a medieval dynasty, the city, then the center of the world, was a place of marvels. Upon returning home, Ito joined the civil service, determined to introduce Western systems and technologies to Japan.

From 1871 to 1873, Ito was a member of the “Iwakura Mission,” a two-year fact-finding tour around Europe and the United States examining Western economic and political models for Japan. It was during this mission that Ito came to the attention of the Japanese nobility. In 1882-83, he lived in Germany, where he was impressed by Prussia’s constitution, economics and politics. He also identified with the German desire to take its place as a global imperial power.

Back home, he became a star reformist. Elected prime minister (the first of four spells in that office) in 1885, he established a Western-style cabinet, civil service, and privy council to advise the imperial household. He also drafted the 1889 Meiji Constitution, a radical document for Japan, enabling wider-than-ever political participation and freedom of speech, religion and of the press. The following year, he established Tokyo’s bicameral assembly. These achievements won him the sobriquet, “The Architect of Modern Japan.”

He was also active in global affairs. With other members of the Iwakura Mission, he had argued against an 1873 invasion of Korea (a plan proposed by redundant samurai) and in 1885, normalized diplomatic relations with China following the Sino-Japanese war. As one of Japan’s most cosmopolitan figures, Ito became widely known abroad. In 1897 he attended Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and in 1901, was awarded an honorary doctorate by Yale University. At home, he was made a marquis.

So far, so good. But inspired by European powers, Tokyo was nurturing an appetite for empire. It was in this direction that Ito turned his energies after resigning from his final term as prime minister in 1901.

Korea question

Since the 1890s, an increasingly confident Japan had been eyeing continental Asia. In this, Tokyo was encouraged by the fading regional powers — the enfeebled Qing China, and the backward “Hermit Kingdom,” Joseon Korea — and by the fact that Korea was well beyond the sphere of influence of Western European powers including the Dutch, the French, the British and the Germans.

In 1895, Japan eliminated Qing power in the Sino-Japanese War. The same year, Japanese assassins, operating under the direction of Consul Miura Goro, murdered anti-Japanese Queen Min.

In 1905, Japan’s stunning military success against Russia, the first time a Western power had been defeated by an Asian one in the modern era, astonished the world, evoking particular admiration in London and Washington. That event, and the Japanese-American Taft-Katsura Agreement, which informally acknowledged Japan’s primacy in Korea, left the peninsula ripe for the plucking.

A diplomat by nature, Ito had attempted to prevent the Russo-Japanese war, but in 1901, had written a blueprint for a Japanese protectorate of Korea. Under this plan, Japan would take control of foreign affairs out of Korea’s hands, thereby serving Tokyo’s geo-strategic interest, while implementing a gradual program of reforms and the modernization of King Gojong’s nation.

With creeping control enabled by military victories, Japan’s premier statesman was appointed to a role commensurate with his abilities: Ito became Japan’s first resident general in Korea in 1905. In Seoul, he appointed a pro-Japanese cabinet, adopted a Korean foster daughter, Bae Jung-ja, and warned Japanese troops to be on their best behavior in their “civilizing” mission.

However benevolent his projects appeared — and he had his admirers, notably the American George Ladd, who wrote a fawning book on Ito’s Korean activities — like colonization elsewhere in the world, they were exploitative.

In 1905, Ito had marched into the palace and demanded the royal seal for the protectorate treaty, and policies in Korea would become increasingly authoritarian as Japan took increasing control of Joseon’s internal affairs.

In 1907, Ito forced the weak — Japan had disbanded Korea’s army — but independently minded King Gojong to abdicate. He was replaced by his imbecilic son, Sunjong. Ito’s removal of Gojong from office generated a wave of resistance, including Ahn’s mission.

What explains Ito’s last words?

This is where matters become less clear-cut. Ito had been at odds with the Imperial Japanese Army faction in Tokyo, and had argued in the cabinet against the annexation of Korea; he wished it to remain a protectorate. The military faction forced Ito to resign as governor general on June 14, 1909.

He retained, however, a diplomatic role — hence his fateful appointment at Harbin on Oct. 26, 1909. Ito considered himself as a moderate, believing that other Japanese sought a harder line in Korea. He was correct. Japan annexed Korea on Aug. 24, 1910.

Mixed legacy

Today, such is Korean glorification of Ahn’s self-sacrificial act that Ito fades into obscurity. The former is now considered perhaps the greatest of Korea’s independence fighters. His chief claim to fame was his assassination of Ito. More recently, attention has focused on his prison writings.

Given Ahn’s statement at the scene, his aim as he opened fire in Harbin was to promote Korean independence. That aim was clearly unsuccessful. Tokyo finalized, and with the removal of Ito, may even have accelerated, annexation.

Ahn’s writings, urging Asians to unite against aggressive European powers, have been praised as a precursor to Pan Asianism. Perhaps. But ironically, his ambition to drive out Europeans was echoed in Japan’s stated goals in the late 1930s for a “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.”

Those goals were met — Tokyo’s early wartime successes so humiliated European powers that empires fell, post-World War II. But what Ahn would have made of Japan’s brutal execution of its avowedly pro-Asian policy can never be known.

Ito’s mark on history was deeper and wider, for he was a key player in the early modernization of Japan, one of the fastest and most remarkable national ascents in history. That ascent had ramifications both great and terrible.

Great? The modernization of the Meiji era was looked upon with envy by reformers across Asia (including by some in Korea) and Japan would be viewed by the Anglo-American powers as the plucky victor over Imperial Russia, as a key World War I ally and as the “Gentleman of the East.”

Terrible? In the wake of the global depression and unequal treaties, Japan moved toward fascism. Her murderous invasion of China in 1937 and later Southeast Asia, her terrible treatment of Allied prisoners of war, and the brutality that marked the final years of her rule in Korea are among the blackest pages in modern history.

Poisoned relations

To outsiders, millennial South Korea and Japan appear very similar nations. From the very look of their citizens — their features, their fashion, their public behavior, all the way up to their landscapes, cityscapes and economies — the uninitiated may not be able to tell them apart.

And indeed they have much in common. They enjoy each other’s cuisine and each other’s popular culture. Speaking strategically, as the key democracies in Northeast Asia and as U.S. partners, they would appear likely partners and natural allies.

Yet they are not. What divides them so bitterly is history, or to be more precise, historical legacies and interpretations thereof.

Ito features strongly in both the above. While some Koreans may fume that the Japanese statesman is placed higher on this list of influencers and icons than his assassin, there are dispassionate reasons for the choice.

As the architect of the protectorate, Ito laid the groundwork for annexation — even if he opposed the latter process. But by then he was out of favor, and annexation deleted Korea from global maps for 36 years.

Moreover, he is the Japanese most closely associated in the modern Korean mind, rightly or wrongly, with colonization. As that episode forms the bedrock of Korea’s emotive nationalism — an enormously powerful force — and has poisoned relations between Seoul and Tokyo for 66 years, nearly twice as long as the colonial period lasted, Ito is an icon, albeit an icon of infamy.

Was he a villain of darkest hue?

In Korea, Ito certainly appears to be cast into shadow by the glorious light shone upon Ahn, but a study of his actual actions reveal a reformist, a diplomat and a moderate rather than a powermonger, militarist or fanatic. He was a less aggressive figure than many European expansionists, and Japan’s worst excesses in Korea would come long after this death.

This makes him a more nuanced figure than the one perceived by Koreans — bullet fodder for a righteous hero — but such is the nature of historical remembrance. In Northeast Asia, where nationalism continues to exert a divisive force, historical reality is more complex than the black and white interpretations so often placed upon it.

Andrew Salmon is a reporter and the author of three works on modern Korean history: U.S. Business and the Korean Miracle: U.S. Enterprises in Korea, 1866 ― the Present; To the Last Round: The Epic British Stand on the Imjin River, Korea, 1951; and Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950.