Gorō Miura

Gorō Miura was one of those Japanese soldiers of the Meiji era who came of age in the civil wars of the 1860s and carried their habits into the politics of a state that was just beginning to build an empire. He is remembered above all as the man who, as Japan’s minister in Seoul, prepared the murder of Queen Min (posthumously Empress Myeongseong) on 8 October 1895. Although a Japanese investigation established his guilt, a court in Hiroshima set him free along with his accomplices, and for the next thirty years he remained a respected figure in Japanese public life. His career illustrates the impunity with which Japanese soldiers and nationalists could act abroad – an impunity that was later to play a fateful role in Manchuria.

A samurai from Chōshū

He was born on 1 January 1847 (by the lunar calendar, the 15th day of the 11th month of the third year of the Kōka era) in Hagi, the capital of the Chōshū Domain, the son of a low-ranking samurai. He took the surname Miura later. He studied at the domain school, the Meirinkan, and in the 1860s joined the Kiheitai, Chōshū’s volunteer units made up of samurai and commoners, which became the nucleus of the modern Japanese army. He fought against the forces of the shogunate in 1866–1868 and, in the Boshin War, took part in the fighting in Echigo Province in the north.

After the fall of the shogunate, Chōshū and Satsuma took the lead in the new state, and Miura rose quickly in the army that was being created. In 1876 he helped to suppress a rising of former samurai in his native Hagi. During the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 he commanded the 3rd Brigade, fought at Tabaruzaka and took part in the final assault on Shiroyama, in which the rebel leader Takamori Saigō was killed. In 1878 he was promoted to lieutenant general.

A general in opposition

Despite his Chōshū origins, Miura did not belong to the faction which, under Aritomo Yamagata, came to dominate the army and politics. In 1881, together with three other generals, he called for a parliament to be convened and spoke out against the scandal over the sell-off of the assets of the Hokkaido Colonisation Office. From 1882 to 1885 he headed the army’s officer school. In 1884 he accompanied Iwao Ōyama on a journey to Europe to study Western armies, and returned an advocate of French models at a time when Yamagata favoured the Prussian ones. That same year he was made a viscount.

On his return he became one of the leaders of the Getsuyōkai, an officers’ association that advocated a smaller, defensive army and criticised the military leadership. Yamagata and his men blocked his promotion. In 1887 Miura was posted to the provinces, to Kumamoto, and in 1888 he was placed on the reserve list. From 1888 to 1892 he headed Gakushūin, the school for children of the aristocracy, and in 1890–1891 he sat in the House of Peers.

Minister in Seoul

In the summer of 1895 the Japanese government appointed Miura minister to Korea in place of Kaoru Inoue. The choice was surprising, since Miura had no diplomatic experience and, by his own account, had refused three times. He arrived in Seoul at the beginning of September. Japan’s position in Korea was poor at the time. After the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Russia, France and Germany had forced Japan to return the Liaodong Peninsula to China, and Queen Min had seized the opportunity to remove the pro-Japanese ministers from power and draw closer to Russia.

Miura concluded that the only way out was to get rid of the queen. According to the testimony of Kenzō Adachi, publisher of a Japanese newspaper in Seoul, the minister asked him around 19 September whether he knew any young men ready for a “fox hunt”. Adachi recruited Japanese adventurers known as sōshi. The plan was approved at the legation on 3 October, with the participation of the legation secretary Fukashi Sugimura and the adviser to the Korean court Ryūnosuke Okamoto. The conspirators drew into the operation the king’s father, Heungseon Daewongun, an enemy of the queen, as well as the Japanese-trained Korean hullyeondae units, so that the attack would look like a Korean coup. When they learned on 7 October that the court intended to disband the hullyeondae, they brought the operation forward.

Before dawn on 8 October, sōshi, Japanese policemen, soldiers of the garrison and Korean troops burst into Gyeongbokgung Palace, killed the queen and burned her body. That same morning Miura arrived at the palace and, together with the Daewongun, appeared before Gojong. For many days afterwards he denied any Japanese involvement. He told foreign diplomats that the attackers had been Koreans in disguise, and telegraphed to Tokyo about a brawl between Korean units. In his memoirs he later wrote that he had made the decision “in the time it takes to draw on a cigarette three times” and that only Heaven could judge whether he had acted rightly.

Trial and acquittal

The testimony of foreigners and the investigation by the Japanese consul Sadatsuchi Uchida and by Jutarō Komura, sent from Tokyo, left no doubt about the minister’s role. The government of Hirobumi Itō, fearing the reaction of the powers, recalled Miura and several dozen participants in the attack to Japan. On arrival in Hiroshima they were arrested on charges of murder and conspiracy. On 20 January 1896 the examining judge dropped the case against 48 civilian defendants, Miura at their head, on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence of who had killed the queen – although in his reasoning he acknowledged that some of them had resolved to kill her and had broken into the palace for that purpose. A few days earlier a military court had acquitted the officers. Some historians believe the government influenced the outcome; others regard it as the judge’s own decision. Miura and his men were welcomed in Japan as heroes.

The éminence grise

Miura did not return to diplomacy, but he did not vanish from public life either. His voice carried weight among politicians and at court. On 14 October 1910, a few weeks after the annexation of Korea, he became a member of the Privy Council, the Emperor’s advisory body. In the Taishō era he opposed government by the Chōshū and Satsuma oligarchs and supported party government. He worked behind the scenes, and the press called him an éminence grise. Twice, in 1916 and 1924, he mediated in talks between the leaders of the opposition parties. The most important of these was a meeting at his house in January 1924, at which the leaders of three parties – Takaaki Katō, Korekiyo Takahashi and Tsuyoshi Inukai – agreed to join forces in defence of constitutional government. Their coalition won the election and formed a government in June 1924. This opened a brief period in which Japan was governed by political parties.

He died of uraemia on 28 January 1926, at the age of 79. He was posthumously awarded the Order of the Rising Sun with Paulownia Flowers. Before his death he dictated his memoirs, which were published under his pen name, Kanju.

Significance

Miura was not a typical expansionist. In the 1880s he argued for a small army and against Yamagata’s militarism, and in the 1920s he supported party government. Yet it was he, Japan’s official representative, who organised the murder of a foreign queen, and his country let him go free. This precedent – an unauthorised operation passed off as the work of locals, and Tokyo’s leniency towards the perpetrators – was repeated in Manchuria. In 1928 officers of the Kwantung Army killed the Manchurian ruler Zhang Zuolin and suffered no serious punishment. In 1931 other officers of the same army staged the Mukden Incident, which marked the beginning of the conquest of Manchuria. Party government, which Miura had helped to bring about, came to an end in May 1932, when young naval officers shot Prime Minister Inukai.