The Japanese annexation of Korea

On 22 August 1910 in Seoul, at the residence of the Japanese Resident-General on the slopes of Mount Namsan, two men put their signatures to a short document of eight articles. For the Korean Empire it was signed by Prime Minister Yi Wan-yong; for the Empire of Japan by the Resident-General, General and Army Minister Viscount Masatake Terauchi. Article 1 declared that the Emperor of Korea ceded to the Emperor of Japan “completely and permanently” all rights of sovereignty over the whole of Korea. Article 2 stated that the Emperor of Japan accepted this cession and consented to the complete annexation of Korea to his empire. The treaty was kept secret for a week. It was proclaimed and brought into force only on 29 August. Hence the two dates found in the literature: 22 August is the day of signature, 29 August the day on which Korea ceased to exist as a state. Koreans call the latter the “day of national humiliation” (kukchiil), and the whole of 1910 “the humiliation of the year kyŏngsul”. For Japan the annexation completed a fifteen-year course that had begun with the war against China; for the empire it was a further step onto the Asian continent. The road to Manchuria ran through Korea.

From the queen’s murder to the protectorate

Japanese rule over Korea did not come about suddenly. In the war with China of 1894–1895 Japan drove the influence of the Qing dynasty out of the peninsula, and in the Treaty of Shimonoseki China recognised the “full and complete independence” of Korea – which in practice meant that Korea ceased to be a Chinese tributary and became the object of rivalry between Japan and Russia. When the court in Seoul began to seek support in St Petersburg, the Japanese minister Gorō Miura organised, in October 1895, the assassination of Queen Min, wife of King Gojong and the most influential opponent of the Japanese. The crime had the opposite effect. In February 1896 Gojong fled to the Russian legation and ruled the country from there for a year, and in October 1897 he proclaimed the Korean Empire and took the title of emperor, to emphasise that he was nobody’s vassal.

The new state’s independence was fragile. Korea had neither a strong army nor allies willing to fight for it. For several years Russia and Japan balanced their influence on the peninsula, but when the Russians stayed on in Manchuria after the Boxer Rebellion, Tokyo decided that the dispute had to be settled by force. The Russo-Japanese War broke out in February 1904. Korea declared its neutrality, but Japanese troops immediately entered Seoul, and on 23 February the Korean government was forced to sign a protocol allowing the Japanese to use its territory for military purposes. In August 1904 a further agreement imposed on Korea a Japanese financial adviser and an adviser on foreign affairs – an American in Japanese service.

Before the war was over, the great powers had accepted that Korea belonged to the Japanese sphere. At the end of July 1905 the American Secretary of War, William Taft, and Prime Minister Tarō Katsura agreed, in a conversation recorded in a memorandum, that Japan had no designs on the American Philippines and that the United States took note of Japanese suzerainty over Korea. On 12 August Britain, renewing its alliance with Japan, recognised Japan’s right to “guidance, control and protection” in Korea. Finally, in the Treaty of Portsmouth of 5 September 1905, defeated Russia acknowledged that Japan possessed paramount political, military and economic interests in Korea. No one asked the Koreans.

The protectorate and Itō’s rule

In November 1905 Japan’s most experienced politician – four times prime minister and author of the constitution – Marquis Hirobumi Itō, arrived in Seoul as the special envoy of Emperor Mutsuhito (the Meiji Emperor). He brought a draft treaty depriving Korea of the right to conduct its own foreign policy. Emperor Gojong refused. On the evening of 17 November, with Japanese soldiers surrounding the palace, Itō came to a cabinet meeting together with the commander of Japanese forces in Korea, General Yoshimichi Hasegawa, and gendarmes, and asked the ministers one by one whether they agreed. Prime Minister Han Kyu-sŏl and the finance minister were firmly opposed, but five ministers, among them the education minister Yi Wan-yong, eventually accepted the treaty. After midnight, on 18 November, the seal of the foreign minister was affixed to it. Gojong never signed the treaty and to the end regarded it as void. Koreans called it the Eulsa Treaty, and the ministers who had backed it “the five Eulsa traitors”. In protest General Min Yŏng-hwan, a relative of the murdered queen, took his own life.

Korea became a Japanese protectorate. In February 1906 the Residency-General began operating in Seoul, with Itō as its first head. He said that Japan did not want to “swallow” Korea but to reform it under its supervision. He looked for Korean collaborators and found them, among others in Yi Wan-yong, whom he made prime minister in 1907. Relations with the emperor, however, quickly turned into mutual hostility. Gojong sent secret letters to foreign monarchs, and in June 1907 he dispatched three envoys to the Second Hague Peace Conference to declare to the world that the 1905 treaty had been extorted by force. The delegates were not admitted to the proceedings, because under the treaty Korea no longer had a diplomacy of its own. One of them, Yi Jun, died in The Hague.

For Itō this was “the last straw”. Yi Wan-yong’s government demanded that the emperor step down. On 19 July 1907 Gojong issued an edict under which the crown prince was to exercise power in his name. The Japanese and the Korean ministers treated this as an abdication and the next day held a ceremony transferring the throne, at which neither emperor was personally present. The new emperor was the son of Gojong and Queen Min, Sunjong, sickly and devoid of political will. On 24 July Itō and Yi Wan-yong signed a new agreement: from then on every law, every ordinance and every appointment to high office required the consent of the Resident-General, and Japanese vice-ministers took their seats in the ministries. A secret annex provided for the disbandment of the army. On 1 August 1907 the Korean guard was disarmed in Seoul, and some of the soldiers took up arms. The disbanded soldiers swelled the “righteous armies” (uibyeong), a guerrilla movement that fought the Japanese throughout the country in the following years. The Japanese army suppressed it ruthlessly, burning villages. According to Japanese statistics, between 1907 and 1911 more than ten thousand insurgents were killed, against a few hundred Japanese dead.

Shots in Harbin

The uprising convinced Itō that his policy of “education for self-government” had failed. In the spring of 1909 Prime Minister Katsura and Foreign Minister Jutarō Komura laid a plan for annexation before him, and Itō, to their surprise, raised no objection. On 6 July 1909 the government in Tokyo resolved that Korea would be annexed “at the appropriate time”. In June Itō had stepped down as Resident-General, and in July his successor, Arasuke Sone, stripped Korea of its judiciary and prison system. In the autumn the army carried out a great sweep against the guerrillas in the southern provinces.

On 26 October 1909 Itō, who had travelled to Manchuria for talks with the Russian finance minister Vladimir Kokovtsov, stepped off the train at the station in Harbin. As he was walking past a line of the Russian guard of honour, the Korean independence activist An Jung-geun fired several pistol shots at him. Itō died less than half an hour later in the saloon car of his train. An, seized by the Russians and handed over to the Japanese, set out before the court in Lüshun fifteen charges against Itō, beginning with the murder of Queen Min. He was executed on 26 March 1910. The assassination did not save Korea. After Itō’s death there was no longer anyone in Tokyo to restrain the advocates of swift annexation, and the army gained the decisive voice in Korean affairs. The pro-annexation Iljinhoe society, backed by Japanese nationalists, published a petition in December 1909 calling for the “union” of the two states. A few weeks later, on 22 December, the young patriot Yi Jae-myŏng attacked Yi Wan-yong with a knife outside the cathedral in Seoul. The prime minister survived with a pierced lung.

Terauchi in Seoul

On 30 May 1910 the Army Minister, Terauchi, a soldier from the circle of Field Marshal Aritomo Yamagata, was appointed Resident-General while keeping his ministerial portfolio. His task was to carry out the annexation quietly and without bloodshed. In June the government in Tokyo laid down the principles for governing Korea after annexation, and in July it approved a plan drawn up by a preparatory commission. On 24 June Korea was compelled to hand its entire police force over to the Japanese, and it was placed under the military gendarmerie. Terauchi arrived in Seoul on 23 July. He banned meetings and speeches, closed or censored newspapers, ordered suspects to be detained in advance, and additional troops were brought into the city.

The negotiations proper lasted only a few days. According to most accounts, on 16 August Terauchi summoned Prime Minister Yi Wan-yong and the agriculture minister Cho Chung-ŭng to his residence and presented them with the draft treaty. Japanese sources state that the first call to accept annexation had been made as early as the beginning of August. Yi Wan-yong did not protest against annexation as such. He bargained over its form. He demanded that the country keep the name Chosŏn (Chōsen in Japanese) and that the emperor keep the title of “king” rather than the lower title the Japanese had proposed, and Terauchi agreed. Japanese accounts add that Yi Wan-yong, who was competing with the Iljinhoe leader Song Pyŏng-jun for Japanese favour, feared that if he did not carry out the annexation himself, a government led by his rival would. On 18 August the council of ministers accepted the draft almost unchanged.

22 August

On the morning of 22 August Japanese gendarmes and soldiers stood every few dozen metres along the streets of Seoul, and reinforced posts were set up around the palaces. In the Changdeokgung palace, where Sunjong lived, a council was held in the emperor’s presence. According to Korean accounts, the only minister to oppose the treaty was the education minister Yi Yong-jik. He was excluded from further deliberations. The emperor, to whom the ministers presented the matter as settled, issued Yi Wan-yong with full powers to conclude the treaty. The document bears the imperial seal and Sunjong’s signature. Some Korean historians believe it was extorted, and according to court tradition the emperor himself never consented to the annexation.

With the full powers in hand, Yi Wan-yong went that same day to the Resident-General’s residence. There he and Terauchi signed the treaty and affixed their seals. The document had eight articles. Besides the Korean emperor’s renunciation of sovereignty, Japan undertook to grant the emperor, his father, the crown prince and their families appropriate titles, dignity and revenues; to confer honours and money on “meritorious” Koreans; to protect the persons and property of inhabitants who obeyed the new laws; and, as far as possible, to admit loyal Koreans to state service. The final article provided that the treaty, once approved by both emperors, would come into force on the day of its proclamation. According to the notes of an official of the Residency-General, that evening Terauchi is said to have composed a poem in which he wondered how the commanders who had invaded Korea under Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 16th century would have looked upon the moon that night. The interpretation of the poem is a matter of dispute in Japan and Korea.

A week of silence

For seven days the Koreans did not know that their state had already been signed away. The Japanese authorities wanted to prepare for possible unrest and to agree with the powers a note on the consequences of annexation for foreigners. On 29 August 1910 the treaty was proclaimed. That day the Emperor of Japan issued a rescript on the annexation of Korea and a decree under which the country would henceforth be called Chōsen. The Residency-General was replaced by the Government-General, and the capital, Seoul, was given the official Japanese name Keijō. Sunjong announced that he was handing over power to “a neighbour he had always trusted” in order to secure peace in the East and the welfare of the people, and called on his subjects to accept the new government calmly. This rescript bears a seal but not the monarch’s personal signature, a point stressed by those who argue that the treaty was void. The Korean Empire ceased to exist after thirteen years, and with it the Joseon dynasty, which had reigned since 1392.

Within the Japanese empire the imperial family was given a position close to that of princes of the blood. Sunjong became “King Yi of Changdeok Palace” and Gojong “the elder King Yi of Deoksu Palace”. Both went on living in their palaces, surrounded by Japanese officials. In October 1910 several dozen Koreans, mostly from the court and the government, received Japanese peerages and grants. Yi Wan-yong became a count. Some refused the titles. Some men of the old regime chose death: in September 1910 the poet and chronicler Hwang Hyŏn took his own life, leaving a poem about how hard it was to be an educated man in such times. All political organisations were dissolved, including the Iljinhoe, which had hoped to be rewarded for its services.

On 1 October 1910 Terauchi took office as the first Governor-General. He answered directly to the emperor and held executive power, the right to issue ordinances with the force of law, and command of the armed forces in Korea. His rule, based on a gendarmerie performing police functions, was called by Koreans “government by the sabre”. The land survey carried out in 1910–1918 deprived many peasants of land they had farmed without documents. Schools taught in Japanese and taught Japanese history. The great powers took note of the annexation without protest. Russia had already recognised Japan’s freedom of action in Korea in a secret agreement of 1907, and on 4 July 1910 it concluded a further agreement with Japan dividing influence in Manchuria. Britain and the United States were concerned mainly with the commercial interests of their citizens.

The dispute over the treaty’s validity

The question of whether the treaty was valid still divides Koreans and Japanese. The Korean side argues that the treaties of 1905–1910 were concluded under military threat, without the monarch’s free consent and in breach of Korean procedures, and were therefore void from the outset. The Japanese side maintained that the agreement had been concluded in accordance with the international law of the time and had been recognised by the powers. When Japan and South Korea established diplomatic relations in 1965, the compromise was expressed in a formula stating that all treaties concluded between the two empires on or before 22 August 1910 were “already null and void”. Each side reads it in its own way. At an international conference of historians and lawyers held at Harvard University in 2001, most Western scholars did not accept the thesis that the annexation was legally void, while no one disputed that it had been imposed by force.

The long shadow of the annexation

For Japan the annexation of Korea was not the end of the road but a new stage on it. The peninsula became a bridge to Manchuria. In 1911 the railways running from Busan through Seoul to Sinŭiju were linked by a bridge over the Yalu to the line to Mukden, and beyond it to the Japanese railway in southern Manchuria won at Portsmouth. From the second half of the 1910s two Japanese divisions were permanently stationed in Korea, while hundreds of thousands of Koreans, fleeing poverty and Japanese rule, settled in Manchuria. Their presence gave Tokyo a pretext for “protecting its subjects” abroad. In the summer of 1931 a clash between Korean settlers and Chinese peasants at Wanbaoshan provoked bloody pogroms of Chinese in Korea and inflamed Sino-Japanese relations. A few weeks later officers of the Kwantung Army staged the Mukden Incident, and on 21 September 1931 the commander of the Japanese army in Korea, General Senjūrō Hayashi, sent his troops across the Yalu into Manchuria without the consent of the emperor or the government. The occupation of Manchuria and the creation of Manchukuo were the first act of a Japanese expansion that turned into war with China in 1937 and into the Pacific War in 1941.

Korea paid an ever higher price for this expansion. After 1919, when the Japanese army and police crushed the peaceful demonstrations of the March First Movement, independence leaders set up the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai. In the 1930s and 1940s the governors-general – above all General Jirō Minami and, after him, Kuniaki Koiso, later Prime Minister of Japan – pursued a policy of forced assimilation: Koreans were ordered to worship at Shinto shrines, to adopt Japanese names and to abandon their own language in schools. During the war hundreds of thousands of people were deported for forced labour in Japan and in the occupied territories, women were forced into prostitution in military brothels, and from 1944 Koreans were conscripted into the army. Japanese rule ended in August 1945. The liberated country, however, was divided along the 38th parallel between Soviet and American forces, and after the Korean War that division remains to this day.