A History of Korea (68 page)

In late 1898 the Independence Club was shut down by the government, which suspected the Club of republican leanings.
The Independent
newspaper had to follow suit a year later, but not before spawning a revolution in mass culture. People associated with the Club started other newspapers, which all sustained the general spirit of using these organs to disseminate information and knowledge, and thereby to build a strong, independent nation and state. Of particular note was the establishment of the
Cheguk sinmun
(“Imperial Post”) and
Hwangs
ng sinmun
(“Capital Gazette”) in 1898, the former written in native script and targeted at the masses, the latter written in mixed Sino-Korean script and aimed at a more educated population. Both newspapers survived largely intact until 1910, serving as the twin pillars of the growing world of publishing during the Great Korean Empire. This sphere of public discourse received its next major boost after 1905, as the forced implementation of the Japanese protectorate in Korea provoked an urgent outpouring of publishing, from newspapers and intellectual journals to books.

As with the railroad and other technological changes, the enlightenment movement’s embrace of the “new learning” to further the aims of Korean self-strengthening and reform constituted a double-edged sword that marked the Korean Empire as a whole. As noted above, the railroad, for all its benefits, ultimately served in 1904–5 to facilitate Japan’s prosecution of its war with Russia over supremacy in northeast Asia. Likewise, the discourse of “civilization and enlightenment” that dominated the public debate during the Korean Empire period proved just as useful to the imperialist forces wanting to conquer Korea as to those who touted this creed in defense of autonomy. To the Japanese (and many Koreans), Korea fell far short in its degree of civilizational advancement, and this served to justify another power’s ambitions to take control of the country. For centuries dating back to the Spanish conquest of the Americas, after all, Europeans had deployed the same rationale to colonize much of the known world. Not surprisingly, Japanese and even many Korean elites argued that Japan had not only an interest but a duty in shaping
Korea’s destiny—out of security concerns, if nothing else, for Korea was too weak to withstand the pressures of Western imperialism. The promotion of railroads, streetcars, electricity, mines, and other hallmarks of modern technology and infrastructure ultimately would prove incapable of overcoming these geopolitical tides.

Thus we return to the problematic place of the Great Korean Empire in the story of Korea’s modern transition. Long stained historically by a perception of failure on the part of the state, elites, and even the masses to withstand imperialist pressures, which led directly to the Japanese takeover, the Korean Empire has recently enjoyed a historiographical resuscitation and an increase in popular and scholarly interest. At one level, the responsibility for the loss of autonomy has shifted more to imperialism as a whole—and not just that of Japan—which exacerbated the complex political rivalries among Korean elites, including the monarch himself. Korea, then, could not have possibly escaped unscathed in this era. At another level, contemporary historians and shapers of popular opinion have accentuated the need to appreciate all the major advances that marked this period, whether in culture, economy, or politics. But such a position has served only to sharpen the condemnation of Japanese actions, for the Korean Empire developments demonstrated that Korea was heading toward an autonomous modernity had Japanese imperialism not intervened. The subsequent colonial period from 1910 to 1945 represented, then, a dreadful “distortion” of national history that robbed the Koreans of the capacity to forge their own modernity. This goes too far—one cannot write off thirty five years of history, after all—but one can understand how the Korean Empire can be considered a major moment in the annals of Korean civilization, and at the very least a key component in Korea’s modern transformation.

16

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The Japanese Takeover, 1904–18

CHRONOLOGY

THE SECRET MISSION TO THE HAGUE, 1907

On June 25, 1907, three curious-looking Asian men carrying the Korean flag and a fierce determination appeared on the grounds of the Second World Peace Conference in The Hague, Netherlands. They had been sent clandestinely by the Korean monarch, Emperor Kojong, and after a long
journey had arrived in Europe to plead the case for Korea’s independence from the encroaching Japanese empire. The three “secret envoys,” however, were turned away by the Conference’s officials and denied a platform to make their case before the gathered diplomats. These representatives from dozens of sovereign states were seeking to codify and institutionalize a global peace regime for a world marred increasingly by conflict. From their perspective, they could not grant the Koreans formal recognition because Korea itself simply had no diplomatic presence on the world stage, having been stripped of its autonomy in foreign relations by the onset of the Japanese Protectorate in late 1905. But the Koreans were ready to demonstrate that the “treaty” that the Japanese claimed authorized its Protectorate had been garnered fraudulently.

Declaring the 1905 treaty invalid and illegal was not a simple matter, however, and neither was the Japanese takeover of Korea that began in 1904. This process in turn reflected the complexities of Korea’s modern history itself. The way one views the Japanese takeover and the nearly four decades of Japanese rule invariably dictates one’s perspective on Korea’s modern experience as a whole, in particular the immense influence exerted by the outside world. Seen from this angle, the Hague incident showed Koreans taking matters into their own hands despite becoming swamped by overwhelming historical forces, including those that would rob them of their political independence.

AUTONOMY AND MODERN HISTORY

The Japanese conquest of Korea, which led to a period of colonial rule that lasted until 1945, constituted the first time since the era of Mongol suzerainty in the fourteenth century that Korea was directly controlled by a foreign power. Understandably, most historical perspectives have tended to focus on the political rupture and to treat the loss of Korean autonomy primarily as a matter of domination, collaboration, resistance, and victimization. They also extend this inquiry to raise questions about the nature and even historical validity of the period under foreign rule, so large was the imprint of the Japanese takeover on the rest of Korea’s twentieth century: how did this happen, and why? In addition to imperialism, historians have cited numerous internal factors, some going as far back as the early nineteenth century (
Chapter 13
),
and including a series of “missed opportunities” by the state and elites to avert the oncoming disaster: the reactionary responses to Western contact in the 1860s; the tepid changes of the 1870s and 1880s; the Chinese domination of the 1880s and 1890s; the incomplete reform movements of the 1890s; and the unsuccessful efforts, hampered by corruption and carelessness, to improve Korea’s diplomatic, military, and economic conditions in the opening years of the twentieth century. Social and cultural factors cited include the stifling effect of a recalcitrant social hierarchy, the weakness of Koreans’ sense of sacrifice and national collectivity, even the Korean customs in marriage, hygiene, and labor. Undeniably, many if not all of these factors did indeed ultimately contribute to the end result, but it is difficult to determine their relative significance, especially of those events that took place long before the first decade of the twentieth century.

On the other hand, one must also not overestimate the significance of the immediate circumstances, namely the 1905–10 Japanese protectorate period leading to outright annexation in 1910. First, such an approach would inflate the impact of two treaties—the 1905 treaty installing the Protectorate and the 1910 Treaty of Annexation—as the boundaries for the takeover process. In fact, one could even argue that these did not even constitute the most important
treaties
, as those in 1904 and 1907 can be considered more consequential (see below). Second, one must be careful not to exaggerate the historical rupture of 1910, as if the annexation acts as a conceptual black hole that sucks in all historical perspective. Such a fixation also leads to a preoccupation with the issue of the “legality” of the Japanese conquest, which, while not unimportant, is moot given the larger historical forces at work. The takeover did not rely on a treaty, and it could not have been legal in any sense but the most absurdly legalistic. And certainly one cannot believe that in 1910 everything changed; indeed, it took another decade for the colonial regime to implant foreign rule securely. The colonial period itself subsequently developed in different ways at different times, and we must situate the colonial experience, as well as the takeover process itself, within the longer processes of modern change.

In the end, the most decisive factor was Japanese imperialism, and the series of events that led to Korea’s loss of political autonomy began in 1904 with the onset of the Russo-Japanese War. The rivalry between these two powers for dominance in northeast Asia had been brewing for some time, and the eruption of hostilities in early 1904 off the west coast of Korea provided the Japanese the justification for taking control of the peninsula. Without the Japanese ambition to first coerce Korea and then to control it directly, Koreans would not have lost their sovereignty—at least not to the Japanese and not at that time, and possibly not at all.

Having said this, it is imperative to maintain the centrality of Koreans in Korean history, an obvious point that often gets lost when revealing the multiple means by which a foreign power imposed its rule over the country. Koreans not only challenged and resisted this effort, but in many ways also aided it, both willingly and not. The path leading to the loss of Korean autonomy, then, was paved by the interaction of imperialism and Korean consent. And one can further divide these factors into the “soft” and the “hard,” with the latter in reference to the mechanisms of suppression engendering various means of resistance.

FORCE AND PUSHBACK

Until recently a historical narrative of domination and resistance prevailed in the common understanding of this period. Even with the emergence of a refreshingly more complex historical picture over the past two decades, it still bears reiterating that the loss of Korean sovereignty depended ultimately on force. The thousands of Japanese soldiers and policemen who entered the peninsula beginning with the Russo-Japanese War established the coercive framework for foreign domination, including the intimidation of Korean officials into signing, without royal consent, cooperative treaties. The first such pact in February 1904, immediately after the outbreak of the war, allowed Japanese soldiers to be stationed on Korean soil. Later, in August, another treaty stipulated a strong role for Japanese advisors in the financial, military, and diplomatic
sectors of the Korean government. This served as prelude to the Protectorate Treaty of November 1905, which followed a peace agreement between the warring sides, brokered by the US, that recognized Japan’s pre-eminent interests on the peninsula (in return, apparently, for Japanese recognition of American imperial interests in the Philippines). This notorious “1905 Treaty,” signed by Korean ministers under coercion, established the Japanese protectorate government, the Residency General. The Residency General controlled the Korean government’s foreign and financial affairs and put in place regional consulates around the country overseeing the Japanese migrant population and military presence. Ito Hirobumi, the venerable “senior official” at the center of Meiji Japan’s modern transformation since the 1860s, arrived in Korea in early 1906 to serve as the first Resident General.

At first, Ito appears not to have envisioned a complete takeover of Korea, but rather a civilizing mission that would curb Korea’s potentially dangerous decay. This outlook took a dramatic turn in the summer of 1907, however, with news of the secret mission to The Hague. Emperor Kojong, who had been a thorn in the Japanese side throughout this period, was forced to abdicate the throne in place of his meek son, who became crowned as Korea’s new emperor. A treaty to accompany this move put in place the framework for total Japanese control over the Korean government by allowing the foreigners to determine appointments to the highest government posts. The disbandment of the Korean army quickly followed, along with the swelling of the combined Japanese–Korean military police force under Japanese control. The assassination of Ito in October of 1909, just a few months after he stepped down as the Resident General, appears to have accelerated the move toward outright annexation, which took place within a year thereafter. But, for all intents and purposes, the 1910 annexation treaty merely formalized the Japanese political control over Korea that had been completed in 1907.