Korea became Japan’s victim amid heydays of imperialism

Members of 11 nationalist groups attend a protest rally in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, earlier this month, urging the Japanese government to apologize for the country’s forced annexation of the Korean Peninsula in 1910 and wartime atrocities. / Korea Times file

By Andrei Lankov

The date of Aug. 22 is one of the darkest in Korean history. This is when the Annexation Treaty was signed by the representatives of the Korean and Japanese governments. Actually, it was largely a formal act that finalized the slow demise of an independent Korean state which began decades earlier when Korea was forced out of a few centuries of isolation and pushed into the modern world.

To be frank, in the world of the late 19th century Korea’s prospects were grim, even though the Koreans themselves might have underestimated the threats they faced. Those were heydays of imperialism, when the nations of Europe were busy conquering the less fortunate parts of the globe, grabbing land and resources, killing peoples and destroying cultures.

There were attempts at resistance, nearly all futile. The odds were too uneven: the West had railways, steamships, ironclads and machine guns, while its opponents were at best equipped with matchlocks. In the entirety of Asia, only a handful of countries managed to survive the colonial onslaught and keep independence: Afghanistan (due to its mountainous terrain and exceptional toughness of its population), Thailand (being sandwiched between British and French colonies, it cleverly used the contradiction of the two global bullies) and China (size does matter, since the huge continental empire was difficult to digest for any predator).

And, of course, there was Japan, the only Asian country which succeeded in emulating the West. Back then, of course, “emulating the West” meant building railroads and training scientists and introducing mass education, but it also meant being imperialist. The small group of smart and determined politicians who, after the Meiji restoration of 1868 were in control of Japan, had no scruples about overseas aggression: actually, they believed that colonialism was the natural thing to do for a modern civilized state. And this was bad news for Korea, since from the very beginning it was seen as a natural target of Japanese expansionism. They discussed a full-scale invasion of Korea as early as the 1870s.

In September 1875, a Japanese warship invaded the Korean coastal waters. The Korean batteries opened fire. This incident created a pretext that the Japanese government needed to stage an expedition to Korea.

The 1876 expedition had only 800 soldiers, and most of its ships were not heavily armed, but the Japanese negotiators bluffed, threatening a full-scale military expedition towards Seoul (it was not feasible, but the Koreans did not know it). Finally, the Koreans gave in and signed what is known as the Ganghwa Treaty. The Koreans agreed to allow foreigners to settle in some selected part of the country, being engaged in trade and business activities in Korea. All foreigners were exempted from the jurisdiction of the Korean laws (a privilege nowadays reserved for diplomats only). Initially these rights were given only to Japanese, but soon pressure from Western countries made Korea extend those privileges to other foreigners as well.

Frankly, not all Koreans opposed the opening. The opponents of self-isolation existed and were happy to give in: they had long been lobbying for formal treaty relations with foreign powers. They believed — correctly — that the continuous adherence to the old social system would lead to disaster, so they hoped that Korea would use the access to foreign knowledge in order to modernize itself as fast as possible. Essentially, they gambled on whether Koreans would have enough time to master new knowledge. The gamble was lost, but it did not appear irrational in the 1870s.

It was not impossible: in Korea there were reform-minded people and, once given an opportunity, Koreans began to study modern science with remarkable zeal. Such estimates are bound to be subjective and improvable, but it seems that a hundred years ago in all of Asia in its zeal for modernization Korea was second only to Japan. Nonetheless, those people — brilliant and determined and selfless they often were — had to run against time. They lost.

To some extent their situation was aggravated by the naive expectations many of them had toward Japan. They believed that Japan, then the only technically advanced Asian country, would help fellow Asians to escape the clutches of the Western colonial powers. Some Japanese also hoped that their country’s policy would move in that direction, but most politicians cynically manipulated these hopes in order to advance their own agenda which was unabashedly imperialist. Japan was loudly talking about “Asian solidarity” until 1945, but it was a smokescreen. Many Korean intellectual leaders did not see through it until it was too late.

The next blow was delivered in 1894-95 when Japan and China fought a brief war over Korea. The war ended in a Japanese victory, but it also left Korea at the mercy of the Japanese. The Japanese installed a puppet government (which, admittedly, included a lot of genuine reformers, still naive about Tokyo’s intentions), and infamously assassinated Queen Min, a staunch opponent of Japanese encroachment.

In the mid-1890s the Japanese had to withdraw, largely because of Russian pressure — the Russian Empire, then rapidly advancing east, saw Korea and Manchuria as its own sphere of influence. The rivalry of the imperialist neighbors gave Koreans a brief reprieve, but in 1904 a new war broke out. This time Japan fought with Russia, essentially in order to become full master of the Korean Peninsula. Once again, Japan won. This victory produced much enthusiasm through the whole of Asia: the first time a Western power was defeated by an Oriental upstart in a regular, large-scale, high-tech war. However, for Korea there was nothing to be happy about. Korea was to become the first Asian nation to learn that Japanese imperialists were no different from their Western teachers — perhaps, they were even worse.

With Russia being neutralized, and its own public being intoxicated with success and jingoism, Japan could afford to be a bully. In 1905 Japan forced Korea to sign a treaty which amounted to the complete surrender of sovereignty.

King Gojong said that he would not sign the document himself, but would leave the decision as to whether it should be signed with his top officials. So, the Japanese managed to blackmail and bribe five high-level Korean dignitaries prepared to sign the paper which was known as the Eulsa Treaty, after the name of the year 1905 in the traditional Korean calendar. Those officials, headed by notorious Yi Wan-yong, are referred to as “the five eulsa traitors.”

According to the 1905 Treaty all international contact with Korea, as well as consular protection of its citizens overseas, should be handled by the Japanese. A Japanese official, called the Resident General, was to supervise all political activity in the country. Without his permission, no political decisions of nationwide importance could be made.

In an attempt to forestall a complete collapse of independence, King Gojong decided to apply to international public opinion. In 1907, The Hague hosted the Second Peace Conference, a pompous international gathering where diplomats from countries large and small were supposed to discuss how to keep the peace and make wars less likely. In those eras, before the rise of the U.N., such public exercises in diplomatic demagoguery were unusual and therefore attracted much attention.

So, three Korean diplomats were dispatched there secretly and dutifully made their appeal against the Japanese actions in Korea. But as one would expect, they achieved nothing: the great powers ignored their appeal and did not raise a finger to help Korea.

It was understandable. First of all, the major international players were colonial powers themselves, so they did not want to create a dangerous precedent. Second, nobody wanted to alienate Japan whose spectacular victory over Russia made it the first “non-white” great power.

The Japanese were outraged when they learned about Gojong’s exercise in secret diplomacy. The aging King was forced to abdicate, passing the throne to his son Sunjong, the last monarch of the Yi dynasty. The 1907 Treaty, forced on Korea, deprived it of the last vestiges of sovereignty.

So, by 1910 Korea already was a Japanese colony in everything by name, and that year merely delivered a final blow to Korean independence. An independent Korea, officially known as the Korean Empire in those days, ceased to exist. It became a part of Japan, but Koreans themselves were not granted the full rights of Japanese citizens. They remained discriminated against — up to a point that they could be subjected to corporal punishment, long banned for the Japanese. Virtually all positions of power were taken by Japanese officials, Korean language publications closed, and teaching in Korean was discouraged.

The long, painful and humiliating colonial era had begun. It took 35 years for Korea to regain its independence. Needless to say, the Korea which emerged in 1945 was a completely different nation.