A History of Korea (63 page)

Immediately after Sunjong’s accession to the throne, on 24 July, the Seven-Article Treaty of 1907 was signed authorizing the Japanese Resident-General to interfere in all matters of internal administration. By its terms, the Chos
ŏ
n government was required to receive his prior consent in legislative enactments, major administrative measures, and the appointment and dismissal of high officials. As it was mandatory to appoint Japanese who were recommended by the Resident-General, a number of Japanese officials were named as vice minister of each ministry. Now Japan changed its previous method of governing through advisers to governing by vice ministers, and so the Japanese held the real power. On the same day Japan enacted a law regarding printed news, strictly censoring the anti-Japanese press.

A week later, on 31 July, Japan dissolved the entire remaining Chos
ŏ
n army units totaling 8,800 men, reducing Chos
ŏ
n to a mere puppet. Courts, prisons, and the police also fell into Japanese hands. The day after the army was disbanded, a battalion commander, Pak S
ŭ
ng-hwan, in mortification, took his own life. Soon the
ŭ
iby
ŏ
ng forces came together to wage an armed struggle against the Japanese. Previously the main component of the volunteer forces had been the peasantry under the leadership of the Confucian literati. This time, however, soldiers from the disbanded Chos
ŏ
n army joined the peasant fighters, enhancing the combat effectiveness of these irregular units. Immediately after the Chos
ŏ
n army was forced to disband, guard units in Seoul engaged in street fighting with Japanese troops, and when their ammunition and supplies ran out, they retreated into the countryside to join the
ŭ
iby
ŏ
ng forces. Among the former Chos
ŏ
n army units, the provincial garrison troops at W
ŏ
nju, Kangw
ŏ
n province, and a detachment force on Kanghwa-do engaged in the fiercest battles
to date with the Japanese. The forces at W
ŏ
nju, in particular, under the leadership of Min K
ŭ
ng-ho and Kim T
ŏ
k-che, enjoyed a series of victories against Japanese troops in central Chos
ŏ
n. Along with 600-man
ŭ
iby
ŏ
ng groups, the former contingents on Kanghwa-do, commanded by Chi Hong-yun and Yu My
ŏ
ng-gyu, extended their activities to Ky
ŏ
nggi and Hwanghae provinces. Besides these former armed forces, H
ŏ
Wi led his volunteers in Ky
ŏ
nggi and Hwanghae provinces, while Yi In-y
ŏ
ng fought in Kangw
ŏ
n province and Yi Kang-ny
ŏ
n operated in the Kangw
ŏ
n and northern Ky
ŏ
ngsang area. Sin Tols
ŏ
k was still actively fighting in eastern Ky
ŏ
ngsang region.

At one point these
ŭ
iby
ŏ
ng groups gathered a united force to drive into Seoul, attack the Japanese residency-general headquarters there, and regain Chos
ŏ
n’s sovereignty. In the winter of 1907 more than 10,000
ŭ
iby
ŏ
ng men, from all over the country, concentrated their forces at Y
ŏ
ju, near the capital. In January 1908 a 300-man advance unit, commanded by H
ŏ
Wi, marched on the Japanese positions within eight miles of Seoul’s East Gate, but their advance was halted by enemy troops. After the drive on Seoul failed,
ŭ
iby
ŏ
ng forces dispersed throughout the country to independently wage guerrilla warfare.

Although the volunteer forces were active mainly in Ky
ŏ
ngsang, Kangw
ŏ
n, Ky
ŏ
nggi, Hwanghae, and Ch
ŏ
lla provinces, their operations extended over almost the entire country. The activity of the
ŭ
iby
ŏ
ng armies peaked in 1908, and then declined. Still, the
ŭ
iby
ŏ
ng became the main resistance force in all subsequent struggles against the Japanese. After the Japanese annexation of Chos
ŏ
n, in August 1910, these irregular volunteers shifted their operations to Manchuria and the Russian Maritime Province, and continued to harass the Japanese, demonstrating the indomitable will of the Koreans to resist Japanese colonialism.

Along with these armed struggles, the Koreans engaged in patriotic enlightenment activities, where men of property, intellectuals, former officials, and reform-minded Confucian scholars organized educational and reform movements to restore their country’s sovereignty. They sought to promote public education and develop the nation’s industries to enhance Korea’s cultural and economic strength. They also established many political and social organizations, and promoted various programs for enlightening the Korean people.

The first such program was the Poanhoe, or Preservation Society, formed by Song Su-man and Sin Sang-jin in 1904. When Japan attempted to seize Chos
ŏ
n’s uncultivated land, the Society aroused public opposition and succeeded in thwarting the Japanese scheme. As a result, it was dissolved under Japanese
pressure. In 1905 Yun Hyo-j
ŏ
ng, Yi Chun, Yang Han-muk, and others formed the H
ŏ
nj
ŏ
ngy
ŏ
n’guhoe, or Society for the Study of Constitutional Government, hoping to establish a constitutional government, but it, too, was forced to disband in compliance with a Japanese ban on public political assembly after the inauguration of the residency-general. The successor to the constitutional movement was the Taehan chaganghoe, or Great Korea Self-Strengthening Society, formed by Yun Hyo-j
ŏ
ng, Chang Chi-y
ŏ
n, Sim
Ŭ
i-s
ŏ
ng, and others in April 1906. This organization aroused Korean opposition to Japanese demands for Kojong’s abdication, and, consequently, it was forcibly dissolved by the residency-general in July 1907. It reappeared later as the Taehan hy
ŏ
phoe, or Great Korea Association.

Harsh Japanese suppression led the Koreans to form a sizable clandestine organization, the Sinminhoe, or New People’s Association, in November 1907, created by businessmen, intellectuals, military men, religious men, and journalists, including An Ch’ang-ho, Yang Ki-t’ak, Yi Tong-hwi, Yi Kap, and Yi S
ŭ
ng-hun. It sought to develop Korean industry by establishing a ceramic factory in Pyongyang, promote Korean education by establishing schools such as the Taes
ŏ
ng School in Pyongyang and the Osan School in Ch
ŏ
ngju, P’y
ŏ
ngan province, and promote Korean public awareness by operating bookstores such as the T’aeg
ŭ
k bookstore in Taegu. At the same time the organization prepared for armed operations against the Japanese. Soon, however, a sharp conflict over the body’s policies developed between moderates such as An Ch’ang-ho, who stressed self-strengthening, and hard-liners such as Yi Tong-hwi, who favored armed struggle. After the Japanese annexation of Chos
ŏ
n, An Ch’ang-ho traveled to the United States to continue his cultural and educational enlightenment movement, and Yi Tong-hwi migrated to Manchuria to wage an armed struggle.

In late January 1907 a campaign was launched among the Koreans to repay the huge national debt that the government owed to Japan. The leaders of this campaign worried that this immense debt threatened the nation’s independence and sovereignty. Although the movement to redeem the national debt was initiated by men from Taegu, such as S
ŏ
Sang-don and Kim Kwang-je, it soon spread nationwide. A fund-raising campaign was launched by the nationalistic press, including the
Taehan maeil sinbo,
the
Cheguk sinmun,
or Imperial Newspaper, the
Hwangs
ŏ
ng sinmun,
or Capital Newspaper, and the
Mansebo,
or Long Live Newspaper. Responding to this nationalistic, patriotic cause, men participated in a no-smoking movement, and women and girls sold their gold
ornamental hairpins and rings. The Japanese saw that this campaign threatened their efforts to colonize Chos
ŏ
n, and they made every effort to thwart it. After falsely charging Yang Ki-t’ak, editor of the
Taehan maeil sinbo,
with embezzlement of contributions entrusted to the newspaper, the movement to repay the national debt came to an end.

Meanwhile, in May 1910, the Japanese Minister of the Army Terauchi Masatake became the new Resident-General, charged with finalizing Japanese control over Chos
ŏ
n by concluding the Treaty of Annexation with the powerless Chos
ŏ
n government. Japan disguised its usurpation of Chos
ŏ
n’s sovereignty as a “duty” to promote the Korean people’s welfare and maintain peace in East Asia. The annexation treaty was formally concluded on 22 August 1910. A week later, on 29 August 1910, Sunjong yielded the throne, and Chos
ŏ
n became a colony of Japan. The Korean people, except for a small opportunistic minority, deeply resented Japan’s domination of their country, and strong Korean resistance to the annexation continued throughout the early years of colonization.

The long rule of the Chos
ŏ
n dynasty, spanning 518 years, left a deep impression on the national attitudes and behavior of modern Koreans. Confucian philosophy, ethics, and government became intrinsic to the Korean culture. Indeed, as seen in North Korea’s “Kim dynasty,” whose ruling ideology is based in part on Chos
ŏ
n’s Confucianism, the traditional political and social order of the Chos
ŏ
n dynasty became the foundation upon which modern Korea has been built.

The fateful Korean-Japanese annexation treaty not only culminated the process of Japan’s domination of Korea but heralded the demise of the Chos
ŏ
n dynasty. Despite the people’s resentment and bitter opposition, Korea had become a colony of the Japanese empire. Following annexation, the Japanese began a 35-year period of colonial rule that profoundly affected the manner in which modern Korea took shape.

Japanese colonial rule in Korea was unusually harsh and destructive, producing virtually no benefit for the Korean people. It was severely systemic and pervasive, an extension of ingrained feudal attitudes that even today influence the behavior of the Japanese toward one another. Having assigned the Koreans an inferior status, Japanese colonial administrators, with unlimited zeal, naturally applied the hierarchical standards of their own society to the Koreans. Japan built huge bureaucracies in Korea, all of them highly centralized and too big by colonial standards. In the mid-1930s, in India, some 12,000 British governed 340 million Indians (a ratio of 1 to 28,000), whereas in Korea approximately 52,000 Japanese ruled 22 million Koreans (1 to 420). The Koreans could not escape the
tight control of a police state, where their political suppression by Japan was thorough and far-reaching. Free speech, free press, suffrage, and representative government were totally absent. Korea escaped the harsh Japanese colonial rule only in August 1945, when Japan yielded to the U.S. and Soviet onslaught that brought an end to World War II.

In the first decade of colonial rule, the Japanese relied on a heavy-handed “military policy,” mainly because of the fierce Korean resistance to Japanese control in the period from 1905 to 1910. Even schoolteachers wore uniforms and carried swords to strike terror into Korean hearts, which had been unheard of in colonial history. As a civilian-led government with comparatively liberal political orientations was formed in Japan proper in the early 1920s, these excesses and abuses were curbed somewhat. At this juncture, the Koreans were allowed to publish their own newspapers and organize themselves politically and intellectually. The ensuing intellectual and social ferment of the 1920s marked a seminal period in modern Korean history. Many developments of that time, including the organization of labor unions and other social and economic movements, exerted their influence into the post-liberation period. But when illiberal forces represented by the military reasserted themselves in the mid-1920s, colonial rule became harsh once again. This trend was further strengthened during the 1930s and 1940s.
¹
All of Korea was totally mobilized for the Japanese invasion and occupation of China, which expanded into the Pacific, forcing the Koreans to assimilate even more as Japanese within their own country.

The objective of the Japanese colonial administration was always to rule and exploit the colony to serve only Japanese interests. The spearhead of Japanese rule in Korea, and at the apex of a highly authoritarian, centralized government structure, was the Office of the Government-General, formerly the Office of the Resident-General. The governor-general, appointed by the Japanese emperor from among the highest echelons of the Imperial Japanese Army’s active list, was independent of the Japanese cabinet.
²
He enjoyed almost complete freedom in the colonial administration. Under his command were five ministries—Secretariat; General Affairs; Internal Affairs; Finance, Agriculture, Commerce, and Industry; and Administration of Justice—which in turn had subordinate agencies including the Interrogation Bureau, the Bureau of the Superintendent-General of Police Affairs, the Railroad Bureau, the Communications Bureau, the Monopoly Bureau, and the Temporary Land Survey Bureau, as well as courts and prisons. The colony was divided into 13 provinces, locally administered, and each was subdivided into
pu
(cities) and counties (made
up of townships). The Japanese established a military police system, in which the police exercised vast powers in peacetime as well as in civil administration and judicial affairs. Alarmed at the intense Korean resistance to colonial rule, Japan stationed two army divisions throughout the colony, including in Seoul. Virtually all key positions, both in the government and in major business and financial enterprises, were staffed by the Japanese. Landholding was drastically “reformed,” and the Japanese appropriated large agricultural tracts for themselves. Agricultural and industrial production in Korea was directed only to serve the needs of Japan, and enough food was produced for all purposes.