Dudden Japan's Colonization of Korea (3)

Japan's Colonization of Korea DISCOURSE AND POWER
Alexis Dudden
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS HONOLULU
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1ntroduction I
I Illegal Korea 7
2 International Terms of Engagement 27
3 The Vocabulary of Power 45
4 Voices of Dissent 74
5 Mission Legislatrice 100
Coda: A Knowledgeable Empire 131

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Voices of Dissent 75

CHAPTER 4

VOICES OF DISSENT

Jnternational terms empower the strong. At the same time, the potential rep­resented by these terms inspires those who resist domination. For the archi­tects of the. Japanese empire, any debate over the relationship between power and words would have seemed nonsensical. The terminology of statecraft, through which modern Japan made sense internationally, defined power itself. Controlling Japanese sovereignty meant controlling the legal terms of gover­nance wherever Japan ruled. This included obvious censorship such as ban­ning books, but on a deeper level it meant negating definitions that challenged Japan's sovereignty, both within Japan and abroad. International terms could only reflect those meanings that inhered to the government's range.

Most translators, politicians, professors, and others who engaged with the terms of international law used a vocabulary that provided the legal structure used by Japan, at home and abroad. The terms of foreign relations used by Japanese officials made sense with a coterminous reformulation of domestic political vocabularies. Diplomats and international legal scholars understood "equality" among nations, for example, in ways that aligned with how parlia­mentary politicians settled the meaning of the terms within Japan. In discuss­ing what he calls "the metaphor of censorship' Pierre Bourdieu argues that "censorship is never quite as perfect or invisible as when each agent has noth­ing to say apart from what he is objectively authorized to say."' The permitted discourse of legal Japan circumscribed expression throughout the geograph­ical realm to which the new regime aspired. Therefore, the few people who challenged the discursive range determined by the state contested what most of society presumed to be a normatively defined, legal terminology.2

A variety of dissenting voices tried to subvert how international terms were understood and used with regard to Japan's annexation of Korea.3 In the first chapter, for example, we followed Yi Sangsol, Yi Jun, and Yi Uijong, who were dispatched in vain to The Hague in 1907 as part of an effort to reclaim Korea's independence from Japanese protection. In the entire process of Japan's annexation of Korea, the censored appeal of these emissaries offers perhaps the clearest illustration of the success of the dominator within the limits of international terms: not only were the Koreans physically expelled from The Hague, but their presence at the conference was expunged from the official record. Though less well known, other examples offer an even more nuanced understanding of the complicated power of these terms. In 1908, for example, a Korean high-court judge demanded that the world recognize his anti-Japanese rebellion as a legitimate war under the terms of international law. The same international arena that ignored the Koreans at The Hague, however, ignored Justice Ho Wi's appeal, and he was tortured to death in a Japanese prison in Seoul. That same year, two Korean immigrants in San Fran­cisco, Chang Inhwan and ChOn MyOngun, shot to death an American diplo­mat to protest Korea's right to exist. One of the men fled to Russia to escape the police, while the other rotted in jail after his lawyer failed to sway juries with a plea of "patriotic insanity?'

Examples from within Japan further reveal the inadequacy of defining power as the sole purview of the dominating nation's people. That is, Japan colonized Korea, but the Meiji government also colonized Japan from within. The few Japanese who tried to define Japan's relations with Korea in the same terms that the state used, but with different meaning, posed as great a threat to the government as the Koreans outside Japan. Anarchists and socialists remain the best-known of protesters at the time. With too few exceptions—Yosano Akiko and Osugi Sakae in particular—many of these thinkers paid virtually no critical attention to Japan's Korea policy until after annexation. Kötoku ShUsui, Japan's most famous anarchist, questioned Japan's involve­ment in Korea earlier than most, and his critique was prophetic in many ways.

In contrast to such a famous dissenter as KOtoku, however, a very differ­ent and almost wholly obscure voice also arose. In the 1870s, Tarui TOkichi, a poor and unsuccessful politician from Nara, began to envision a new nation he called "Great East" (Daitö), which would be formed by blending together Japan and Korea. The Meiji government censored Tarui's plan, until it effected its own version of DaitO by annexing Korea in 1910, whereupon Japanese offi­cials celebrated Tarui's book, and nationalists ultimately co-opted his legacy

74

76 Japan's Colonization of Korea Voices of Dissent 77

into their glorious history of Asianist expansion. In all these examples, police, statesmen, and censors judged alternate definitions of international terms inadmissible or illegal vis-à-vis the state's encoded limits for them, erasing the proposed meanings and often the people themselves from the record of legit­imate Japan.

HO WI AND THE UIBYONG

Ill-equipped, poorly trained, and sporadically organized Korean men and women formed troops that fought armed, uniformed, and quartered Japa­nese troops throughout the hills of central and southern Korea between 1906 and 1914. Canadian reporter Frederick McKenzie described the first group of Righteous Army (Uibyong) fighters he encountered near Wönju in the autumn of 1907:

[ H ] alf a dozen of them entered the garden, formed in line in front of me and saluted. They were bright lads, from eighteen to twenty-six. One, a bright-faced, handsome youth, still wore the old uniform of the regu­lar Korean Army. Another had a pair of military trousers. Two of them were in slight, ragged Korean dress. Not one had leather boots. Around their waists were homemade cotton cartridge belts, half-full. One wore a kind of tarboosh on his head, and the others had bits of rag twisted round their hair.4

McKenzie's photograph (Fig. 3) of this group of fighters or a similar one is one of the best-known images of Korea from the period.

The Uibyong were anti-Japanese fighters, arising from a tradition whose leaders proclaimed violent uprisings against Japan as their sole patriotic recourse. Most often their leaders relied on an orthodox school of Confucian thought to describe their actions. One commander, however, declared the Righteous War legal in terms of international law. Ho Wi (also known by his nom de guerre, Wang San) argued that the Koreans fought a just war and demanded that they be allowed to effect changes within Korea that would regain the country's sovereignty. As a judge on Korea's high court, he knew that the complete eradication of Japan's privileges was critical in order for the Korean government to rule itself.

In the late spring of 1908, the commanders of several Uibyong brigades made a large-scale push to recapture Seoul from the Japanese colonial regime. According to the Japanese Resident General's official figures, the "rioters" (boto, as they were belittled in Japanese) numbered 11,400 people at the time.5 Though he was unsuccessful, HO argued that the Korean government must define itself in terms of independence and sovereignty, and he issued a list of thirty demands to Resident General ItO Hirobumi calling for the full rectifi­cation of Korea as a nation.6 His first three demands included the restoration (yusin) of Emperor Kojong, the reinstatement of control over diplomatic rights, and the abolishment of the Japanese colonial office. The Japanese tried to prevent the list of demands from being made public, but the most daring newspaper remaining in operation in Seoul, the TaeHan Maeil Sinbo, alluded to it shortly after its publication: "Rumor abounds that the UibyOng... sub­mitted a list of thirty demands, including the abolition of the Resident Gen­eral, the expulsion of Japanese officials, the restoration of diplomatic rights, and other things."7

The previous summer, the Japanese government had forced the Korean Emperor Kojong to abdicate and installed his son as a puppet ruler. The Japa­nese-backed succession delegitimated the new emperor's rule within Korea. In HO's thinking, "restoring" Kojong would relegitimate the line. Only when Korea could articulate a condition of self-rule would Koreans be able to describe the nation as sovereign in international terms. Meanwhile, according

Image

FIGURE 3. Korean resistance fighters, 1907

78 Slapan's Colonization of(orea Voices of Dissent 79

to the Japanese colonial records, fierce battles on the outskirts of Seoul con­tinued through June.' In the end, the superior numbers, munitions, and organization of Japanese troops prevailed, and Ho was captured and tortured in jail. HO's attempt to resuscitate the place of Korea in foreign consciousness resulted in his death.

Earlier bands of righteous fighters waved reactionary banners proclaiming their uprisings in terms quite different from the ones Ho Wi and his comrades used a decade later. In 1895 the antiprogressivist scholar Mun SOkbong led the first in a five-month-long series of armed uprisings against the Japanese in Korea and also against fellow Koreans he believed to be sympathetic to Japan. One of his comrades, Yu InsOk, wrote a manifesto steeped in typical anti-Japa­nese rhetoric ("Japan has forced us to cut our top-knots") and described the Japanese as "Western bandits?'9 The scholars and fighters of this 1895 "right­eous uprising" despised Japan and the Japanese, and they believed that all recently imported intellectual and material elements in Korean society were evil. The movement disbanded in part because the king rescinded the inflam­matory top-knot decree that required adult males to adopt the so-called civ­ilized, short haircut of the West. Despite the rebels' outrage toward him, the king named them "loyal" and pardoned them. '°

HO Wi, Yi Sangch'on, Pak KyubyOng, and others shared a similar hatred of Japan when they revived the idea of a Righteous Army in the summer of 1904. Departing from the tactics of their predecessors, however, the men used international terms to make their appeal." HO Wi had participated in earlier uprisings, and he never rejected outright his old principles. He did not, for example, condemn Confucian thought and become a member of So Chaep'il's Independence Movement.12 In 1894 the first progressive reforms, the Kabo Reforms, wholly reorganized the Korean judicial structure.13 Furthermore, although the political upheaval following the Sino-Japanese war reversed many of the reforms, the Independence Movement thinkers as well as the "reform Confucianists' as they were known, endeavored to keep the changes to Korea's legal system in place. After all, HO passed an exam to enter govern­ment service in an independent Korea—the Empire of Great Korea—a polit­ical condition that did not exist when he participated in the first round of anti-Japanese fighting. As his biographer Cho TonggOl wrote, while preserv­ing "the façade of a righteous fighter' HO became an enlightenment thinker.14

HO moved to Seoul in the late 1890s, and he determined to "shed" the provincial doctrine guiding his thinking.15 He studied at the national Confu­cian academy, the SOnggyungwan, and passed the government's civil service exam. In 1904 he became a judge on Korea's high court. That summer, as a newly minted arbiter of law, Ho made every attempt to explain the new Right­eous Army's cause in terms of national sovereignty and international law. On July 1, the Hwangsong Sinmun printed the group's manifesto, a proclamation that the Japanese Foreign Ministry promptly catalogued as a "declaration of independence from Japan."6 HO and his comrades announced that Japan was deceiving the Koreans and called for a national "armed uprising" in pro­test: "Japanese will emigrate in droves to our country and pillage it.. . . We are morally obligated to redeem ourselves and preserve the territorial integrity of our country. . . . Compatriots, we appeal to you to join us in our bloody strug­gle. We must cover the countryside and make banners from old cloth and weapons from farm implements to overwhelm the enemy... Heaven sup­ports our just cause."7

Although resonant with older, "righteous" rhetoric, in this proclamation HO used the new international terms with which he had become familiar. He knew the expression "territorial integrity" from the agreement signed the pre­vious February between Japan and Korea. The concept determined a basis for national independence, and HO used it in an effort to rally Koreans to the cause. Andre Schmid has described how ideas of "territory" and "sovereignty" were becoming linked at the time as a means to define Korea's historical exis­tence and place claims on the past. Schmid argues that "building on a number of late ChosOn spatial discourses while supplanting others, the Korean state together with leading nationalist writers sought to define spatial conceptions

of the nation within the vocabulary and practices of territorial 18

HO was different from the thinkers discussed by Schmid; he was not concerned with redrawing Korean maps to aggrandize an originary Korea. Rather, he sought to ascribe the internationally sanctioned terms of national definition to his Righteous Movement.

Throughout his campaigns, HO appealed his cause to the nations that sus­tained Japan's erasure of Korea, because they constituted the international audience. In the summer of 1904, a year before Japan declared Korea its pro­tectorate, HO wrote:

According to their terms . . . Japan may "take the necessary measures if the welfare of the Imperial House of Korea or the territorial integrity of Korea are endangered." This provision does not ensure the welfare of our country. It is a trick to assert Japanese supremacy in Korea.19

Earlier in 1904, the Korean government formally declared its "neutrality" when Russian and Japanese troop movements indicated that war would soon break out. In February, the Japanese envoy to Seoul, Hayashi Gonosuke,

80 Japan's Colonization of 'Korea Voices of Dissent 81

signed a protocol with the Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yi Jiyong, assuring that "the Imperial Government of Japan guarantees the indepen­dence and territorial integrity [ryodo hozen/yongo pochdn] of the Empire of

Great 20 The protocol's subsequent article promised Japanese assis‑

tance should a "third country or internal uprising endanger the territorial integrity of Korea." Finding the agreement vacuous, Ho challenged the pro­vision that granted Japan the privilege of "occupy[ing] strategic points when necessary":

Fisheries and railways are now open to Japanese control. . . Japan will occupy strategic points all over the countryside . . . revealing Japan's desire to swallow Korea.2'

He viewed the "strategic points" clause as evidence of "the inconsistency of Japan's words and actions?' As a result, he judged that "this agreement violates the basic principles of international law."22

Expressing his cause in international terms not only enabled Ho Wi to elicit sympathetic support but also permitted him to define his war as a legal response to Japan's actions. Unfortunately for HO at the time, his condemna­tion of Japanese "inconsistency" was undermined by Japan's repeated assur­ances to Korea that Korean independence would be fully restored after the war with Russia (promises publicized in the popular press to the Korean people).

In the wake of the protectorate, HO Wi left Seoul to plan an uprising that would amount to a legally declarable war. As luck would have it for HO, the Japanese disbanded the Korean army in 1907. The soldiers, angry and often taking their weapons with them, scattered around the country. HO did not intend to be a lone martyr, and in order to mount the war he wanted to declare, he formed an alliance with another Righteous leader, Yi InyOng, and together they began to collect troops. Like HO, Yi knew the importance of making their cause intelligible to the world. In September 1907, Yi InyOng distributed an ultimatum throughout Korea, demanding the "restoration of [Korea's] independence which he also sent to each of the foreign consulates in Seoul. He even mailed the proclamation to Korean groups in Honolulu and San Francisco, so their members could publicize his message abroad.23

Together, as the self-proclaimed National High Command of the Righteous Army, HO Wi and Yi InyOng issued a new declaration of their combined legit­imacy: "The Righteous Army is a patriotic society. The Great Powers must acknowledge that Japan violated international law in waging war on us. We appeal in the name of justice and humanity.1124 Their plan to recapture Seoul in November 1907 aimed at "eradicating the treacherous new treaty" Japan had imposed in order to "reestablish the conditions of a nation."25 From its inception, HO defined his war as the legitimate means to prevent Japan from erasing Korean sovereignty—a just response to a breach of the international standard to which the Powers subscribed.

HO's attempt to legally declare war failed. At the time, he was not a true representative of Korea any more than the three envoys to The Hague, and no foreign country recognized his appeal. The Powers maintained their nations' commercial privileges in Korea through treaties with Japan, the outward guardian of the peninsula. A foreign representative's sanction of HO's war as just would have challenged Japan's classification in international law as Korea's protector, at a time when the imperializing nations of the world granted Japan "paramount supremacy" in Korea. Recognizing what Japan called a "rebellion" in Korea as a "war" would have legitimated "rebellions" around the world—in the Philippines, Hawaii, Vietnam, Malaysia, Algeria, Egypt, Madagascar, and Morocco, to name just a few. Japanese troops captured and imprisoned HO Wi early in 1908, and the Japanese government labeled him a "rioter." He died in jail that summer.

CHANG INHWAN AND CHON MYONGUN

On 23 March 1908, Chang Inhwan and ChOn MyOngun, two young Korean immigrants in San Francisco, shot Durham White Stevens, an American dip­lomat, in front of the San Francisco ferry terminal as he prepared to embark for Washington, D.C. Stevens, who worked for the Japanese government as an advisor to the Korean court, had returned to the United States on official duty and to visit his family. Two days after the shooting, Stevens died. Just before his death, the Meiji emperor conferred on Stevens the highest honor any indi­vidual could receive for service to the Japanese nation, the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun. Stevens was buried on April 8, after a funeral service at St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., which included among the hon­orary pallbearers Secretary of State Elihu Root. Large and impressive memo­rial services followed in Seoul and Tokyo, with the entire office of the Japa­nese Foreign Ministry in attendance at the latter.26

ChOn fired the first shots at Stevens, but when he missed, he charged for­ward and began striking Stevens on the face with his revolver. In the frenzy that ensued, Chang accidentally shot Chön as he fired the two fatal bullets into Stevens's back. While the gathering crowd cried, "Lynch the murderer!" police

82 fjapan's Colonization of Korea Voices of Dissent 83

arrested Chang and imprisoned him without bail.27 Police Judge C. T. Conlan ordered Chang to appear before San Francisco's Superior Court on a charge of murder. Chön, who was hospitalized for his gunshot wound, was unable to appear for arraignment until May 1. At his preliminary hearing, on May 8, Chön was ordered to stand trial as an accessory to murder. San Francisco attorney Nathan Coughlan defended Chön and Chang, pursuing an insanity defense for both men based on Arthur Schopenhauer's theory of patriotic insanity. The Koreans' was a "nobler kind of insanity," Coughlan argued, defin­ing their condition as "excessive patriotism.

'28 In mid-June Chón was tem­porarily freed and fled to Siberia.29 The following winter, Chang was sentenced to serve twenty-five years at San Quentin for second-degree manslaughter. He served ten. In 1930, impoverished and disaffected, Chang committed suicide in San Francisco. He remained buried there until 1975, when South Korean President Pak Chonghfli ordered his body reinterred in Seoul in the Korean National Cemetery, with full hero's honors.30

When Chang and Chön found themselves in jail for shooting an American citizen in the United States, the Japanese government found itself taking cen­ter stage, and also in a precarious legal position. The first article of the 1905 protectorate agreement declared that, concurrent with Japan's usurpation of Korea's foreign affairs, "Japanese diplomats and consular representatives [would] protect [hogo] Korean subjects and their interests in foreign cOun-tries?'3' The Japanese government and immigration-company recruiters enjoyed the power this provision guaranteed in thwarting competitive Korean emigration to Hawaii, but in this instance, the potential this clause opened for Japanese legal responsibility panicked the Japanese government.32 Chang and Chön, however, never sought Japanese legal protection. Quite the opposite. The Korean men's cause diametrically opposed protection by any representa­tive of Japan. They believed that what they did and what they said would elicit sympathy for their cause from Americans, and would also convince the world that an independent nation called Korea continued to exist. When Chang and Chón gave statements to the press directly after shooting Stevens, each openly admitted his culpability. "Yes, me shoot him' Chang reportedly stated. "Me sorry? No, Him no good. Him help Japan."33 Both Koreans described their action as the patriotic means of sustaining the independence of their country:

Stevens is a bad man. . . . He is a traitor to Corea and with smooth words has deceived the heads of my country. . . . Soon all Coreans will be dead and the Japanese will fill the country. . . . I am a patriot and I

shot Stevens because I think he is a traitor.. . . Corea is as good a coun­try as Japan and Corea does not want the Japanese to come and take the power as Stevens said. . . I do not care what happens to me. I hope I killed Stevens.34

Though reported in fractured English—perhaps verbatim but also possibly exaggerated to affect a further foreignness of the subject—Chang's point was clear: "Corea is as good. . . as Japan and Corea does not want the Japanese to come and take the power." While not invoking any nominal legal doctrine, Chang's statement succinctly embodied his position in recognizable interna­tional terms: Japan's erasure of Korea's external sovereignty was insupportable because internally a country continued to exist.

In further statements to the police and court, Chang again justified his actions as necessary to maintain the integrity of his homeland:

Why would I not kill him? Thousands of thousands of people have been killed through his plans. . . . So I shot him for the sake of my country.35

I prefer martyrdom by death rather [than] by imprisonment. I did my duty to the country and I don't care what the law does to me. 36

Chön Myongun more plaintively demanded recognition of Korea's existence:

My name is M.W. Chun [sic]. I am 25 years of age. . . . All the world looks on Corea as a low country and I was very sorry for it. I left my home for studying to help our country as other nations, but since I left the con­dition of Corea became worse. Japan thinks might is right, and would force our government to make treaties. And after that the great trouble started in our country. My brothers and relatives have been killed by Japanese, but I have no power to do anything here, and so I have always had to stand around helpless. .. . After I saw what Mr. Stevens said I decided to kill him and to kill myself too.37

Chön explained why, for him, murdering Stevens was the rational choice to avenge the deaths of his family members and also to try to prevent the death of his country.

The Shufeldt Treaty between the United States and Korea (1882) legally promised American assistance to Korea and also established the practice of an American advisor at the Korean court. Serving under Emperor Kojong in

84 [Japan's Colonization of Korea Voices of Dissent 85

1883, Lucius Foote personally inaugurated this policy. Foote and subsequent

advisors—Owen Denny (1886-1890), Charles LeGendre (1890-1894), Clar­ence Greathouse (1894-1900), and William Franklin Sands (1900-1904)---‑

often warned the Korean court about Japan's increasing powers but did not

encourage any formal U.S. protest.38 Twenty years later, this practice ended when the second article of the August 1904 agreement between Japan and

Korea transferred the Korean government's ability to select its foreign advisor

to the Japanese government.39 The Japanese Foreign Ministry appointed someone from within its own ranks to assume the role of the American advi‑

sor: Durham White Stevens. Despite the difference in the structuring of his

appointment, the legacy of earlier American advisors had, for right or wrong, helped to engender a vaguely popular consciousness in Korea that abstract

entities called 'America" and 'Americans" were on Korea's side against the Japanese. This consciousness prevailed to the extent that the Korean, Japanese, and American press all mentioned it at the time of Stevens's assassination.

Beginning in 1883, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs employed Stevens in a variety of jobs in both Tokyo and Washington. During his tenure

as a lobbyist for Japan in America, Stevens became good friends with Japan

boosters such as George Trumbull Ladd and George Kennan, members of what Bruce Cumings has described as "the usual retinue of cheerleading

American scholars."40 These men often wrote for Progressive-era journals

such as North American Review, Outlook, and World's Work, and in general they praised the Japanese government's efforts with what they routinely described

as the "degenerate" Koreans.4' The ruse of Stevens' new appointment in 1904

as the "neutral" foreign advisor to the Korean emperor did not fool many peo­ple. Nonetheless, American businessmen who were increasingly involved in

railroad, mining, lumber, patent, and immigration contracts in Korea with both Korean and Japanese firms assumed that the American Stevens would always favor their concerns.42

In March 1908, a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Stevens when he arrived. Stevens is quoted as saying, "The peasants have wel­comed the Japanese, while the official class has not, but even the officials are beginning to see that the only hope for the country lies in a reorganization of the old institutions." 41 Stevens naturalized Japan's protection of Korea and defined the country's internal structures as unsound. The reporter summa­rized, "Stevens says the Corean people have been greatly benefited by Japanese protection and that they are beginning to look more favorably on it." 44 In a coincidence that proved fateful for Stevens, the Righteous Army leader

Yi Inyóng issued a proclamation to Koreans residing abroad, which arrived on the same ship carrying Stevens to San Francisco: "Compatriots, we must unite and consecrate ourselves to our land and restore our independence. You must appeal to the whole world about grievous wrongs and outrages of bar­barous Japanese. They are cunning and cruel and are enemies of progress and humanity. We must do our best to kill all Japanese, their spies, allies, and bar­barous soldiers."45 The leaders of the San Francisco immigrant community ruminated over these fiery words after church on the Sunday following the ship's arrival. At the same meeting, they also discussed the statements Stevens had made to the press several days before.46 According to subsequent news­paper headlines, members of the Korean community in San Francisco furi­ously responded to Stevens' words. Under the headline, "PLAN ASSAULT OVER PRAYERS," a San Francisco Chronicle reporter explained how members of two Korean immigrant organizations (the Kongnip-hwae and the Taedong-hwae) met on early Sunday evening with "hatred for Japan and the man who approved of Nipponese rule . . . strong in the breasts of them all."47 An article in the California Korean paper, the Kongnip Sinmun, reported that the Sunday gathering had "turned into a meeting for the discussion of adequate measures to be taken against Stevens." 48

There were two attacks on Stevens. The first occurred in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel on the evening of March 22. Encouraged by Yi Inyöng's call to arms, representatives from the immigrant societies—Yi Hakhyon, Mun Yang-mok, Chöng Ch'aekwan, and Ch'oe Yusöp—went to the hotel to question Stevens about his statements to the Chronicle.49 A desk clerk called Stevens

down from his room to inform him that a delegation of "Japanese men" had come to welcome him to the city. The Koreans greeted Stevens and asked

whether the words reported in the paper were his. When he said yes, they

began hurling large rattan chairs at him.50 Although the mayhem was no more than a minor scuffle—the Koreans were quickly thrown out of the hotel, and

Stevens received only a few cuts on his face—the printed report, "COREANS

ATTACK A DIPLOMAT' touched off a narrative describing the "bloodthirsty" Koreans.5' Worse still for Koreans trying to attract sympathetic attention from

the Americans against the Japanese, the next day Chang and Chön shot the diplomat, imbuing whatever any other Korean said in the press at the time with a violent hue.

Japan's colonial aspirations for Korea had strengthened under the gaze of the international press the previous summer, in the wake of the Korean mis­sion to The Hague, and the reporting surrounding the Stevens shooting only

86 gapan's Colonization of Korea Voices of Dissent 87

compounded these opinions. Yale Professor George Trumbull Ladd assumed the prosecutor's role in the editorial pages of the New York Times. In one arti­cle, Ladd declared the Koreans a "bloody race' adding in another that "the really significant thing is that such assassination is no new, and no rare occur­rence in Korean history."52 Although several columnists tried to avoid con­demning the Koreans as murderers before their trial, reporters on both coasts of the United States infantilized and dehumanized the Korean men:

The Korean Chang who shot Mr. Stevens to-day is about as large as a 12-year-old boy, but he says he is 30 years old.53

The tiny Corean stood stoically in the corner of the room [suppressing] the fanatic zeal of the Corean "schoolboyS."54

Even the weapons involved in the assassination did not meet standards of manhood:

The revolver which Chon used to strike Stevens . . . is a cheap weapon that looks more like a boy's toy pistol than a revolver. The barrel of the gun is only an inch and a half in length. . . Chang's weapon [was] also a .32 but possessing little penetrating power.55

An earlier, sustained discourse of the "degenerate" Koreans foreshadowed and was interwoven with the discussion of "the bloodthirsty" and "childlike" Koreans at this time. Despite the Korean men's efforts to explain that they resorted to their actions as patriotic men fighting for their country—"Corea is as good a country as Japan"—the colonial ordering of peoples classified the Koreans as incapable of governing themselves.

On the one hand, the Japanese consul in San Francisco, Koike ChUzö, wor­ried that Japan's legal control of Korea under its protectorate arrangement would hold Japan legally responsible for the Korean men. On the other hand, the consul also worried that the protectorate arrangement was still not per­ceived as legitimate in the international arena. As soon as Stevens was shot, Koike urgently requested printed materials from the Colonial Administration Records Office in Tokyo, in case he found it necessary to display Japan's "enlightened" administration to United States officials.56 As American press attention increasingly focused on the Koreans, Koike sent a cable to Foreign Minister Hayashi Tadasu in Tokyo, warning that "lies" the Koreans were print­ing in their local papers would spread into the American press, contaminat­ing American opinion of Japan: "[The Koreans] are trying to shock American public opinion about Korea by deceiving [Americans] with this opportunity. They are playing with language that is becoming extremely dangerous, prais­ing the murderers as righteous patriots and crying that the Japanese are bar‑

baric thieves [wazoku]

In keeping with the larger policy of lexically demeaning Korean resistance —a policy that belittled the Righteous Army soldiers who protested the Japa‑

nese regime as rioters and declared their war a rebellion—Koike and other Japanese officials had to prevent the Koreans in America from being perceived as "patriots' Koike's concern over the eruptive potential of the terms is reveal­ing. In her examination of what she calls "excitable speech' Judith Butler asks readers to "consider the situation in which one is named without knowing that one is named.... The name constitutes one socially, but one's consideration takes place without one's knowing'58 Butler's point is key here, as Koike's determination to prevent the "language" from eluding his direct control points to how a "named" object acquires its name in the first place. For Koike, in a position of power, the Koreans were "playing with language' which, if coun­tered properly, he could control. The Japanese consul could officially "name" the Koreans "without their knowing," as it were, or in a way that was beyond

their control.

Meiji officials foreclosed the question of Japanese legal entanglement with the Korean men, not only by expressing grief for Stevens' death on behalf of a civilized nation but also by naming him a hero of both Japan and America. Instead of "protecting" the Koreans abroad as Japanese near-subjects, the Japanese government made every quasi-official effort to "protect" Stevens, its American employee. The Japanese government opportunely encouraged the perception that the Koreans were "bloody assassins" who had slaughtered a great statesman.59 Foreign Minister Hayashi cabled Stevens in the hospital, and the cable was reprinted publicly in the San Francisco Chronicle: "I am profoundly shocked to learn of the dastardly attempts on your life. I am anx­iously awaiting for speedy news of your recovery. In the meantime the Con­sul-General of San Francisco has been instructed to offer you all the assistance and aid in his power."60 The same Chronicle article also reprinted ItO Hiro‑

bumi's personal note to Stevens: "Deeply grieved to hear of dreadful attack. Sincere hope for speedy recovery." 61 After Stevens died, Ito eulogized him to

reporters: "I regard the death of Mr. Stevens as a national disaster and a per­sonal loss?162 While bemoaning the "disaster' Ito took special care to quote the American ambassador to Japan, who praised Stevens as a "loyal American." 63 In claiming Stevens' death as a "national disaster" for Japan (and according

88 [Japan's Colonization of Korea Voices of Dissent 89

him the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun), the Japanese government elevated itself on a par with the United States, and far above the "childlike" Korea. The "bloody race" of Koreans did not consist of equal human beings. The appeals that Chang and Chön made for Americans to pay attention to the violence the Japanese regime perpetrated in Korea evaporated with the death of the "loyal American," who was revered by the nation of Japan.

In a final plea for understanding, Chang Inhwan wrote a letter from his prison cell to the San Francisco Chronicle on 24 March 1908. The following morning, the front page of the paper featured a facsimile of his handwritten note as background to a photograph of a silhouette of Chang's head (Fig. 4). The paper offered a sketchy translation on an inside page, but in fact only the already sympathetic could read the visible part of the letter. The simplicity of Chang's final line provided a sharp closure to the Koreans' effort to maintain their country: "What other words could I say?" [Tarun mal hal kOt op no ra?]M

Image

In 1905, the Korean emperor's aide-de-camp, Min Yonghwan, committed sui­cide to protest the Japanese protectorate. Mm's suicide, followed by several others, embodied the desperation of official attempts to preserve Korea's sov­ereignty, as those Koreans who remained in power—most noticeably Yi Wan-yong—transferred Korean sovereignty to Japan. In the summer of 1907, when Prime Minister Yi made Emperor Kojong abdicate in favor of his son, he and his supporters brought about the end of Korea's independence for forty years. Chang, an unknown immigrant to San Francisco, tried with others to present the existence of their country to the world. Their words found no audience, and like Ho Wi, Chang and ChOn resorted to violence.

KOTOKU SHOSUI

Throughout the year 1910—before police arrested KOtoku Shüsui in con­nection with a plot to assassinate the Meiji emperor—inspectors gathered materials loosely related to KOtoku, concerning a plot to build bombs that would be thrown at an imperial procession. The government's desire to make KOtoku the central figure in what became known as the Great Treason Inci­dent stemmed primarily from his career of subverting the terms with which the Meiji government ruled Japan. It is, therefore, no new insight to argue that KOtoku contested the terms of sovereignty in Japan.

At the turn of the last century, KOtoku's disaffection with European liber­alism and his turn to socialism intersected with his increasing disdain for Japan's foreign policy.65 Unlike several of his contemporaries, however, KOtoku was less concerned with a particular group or nation exploited by Japan than with imperialism in general.66 In this vein, although KOtoku con­tinues to claim top billing in the history of early-twentieth-century resistance, his practical sympathies for those being dominated seemed almost nonexis­tent at times and often made him sound a bit like the government he criti­cized. Writing in his diary toward the end of June 1905, for example, KOtoku mentioned that he wanted to retreat from the world "to buy some land in Hokkaido or Korea... [to] lead an ideal life."67 Kötoku's blank and therefore colonizable Korea gives precedence to Louise Young's insight about Japanese depictions of Manchuria in the 1930s as an "empty, flat space—a vast fron­tier awaiting Japanese settlement. This depopulation of the imaginary land­scapes of the region was an expression of the imbalance of power between the Japanese and their others."68 The great rebel likewise envisioned "empty" places where his personal settlement would cause no particular dislocation.

FIGURE 4. The letter from Chang Inhwan that appeared in a photograph on the front of the San Francisco Chronicle,

25 March 1908

90 japan's Colonization ofJ(orea Voices of Dissent 91

Although it is useful to know that Kötoku had no great love for Korea, his scathing assessments of Japan's efforts to lead Korea to enlightenment allowed him to redefine the object of international terms. In short, in his analysis of Japan's Korea policy, KOtoku demanded that international terms allow the people of a nation—not the state itself or its aggrandizers—to benefit from international exchange. Kotoku derived his new international order from an awareness of how the system's terms worked in the world around him: "We once favored the expression 'fostering independence.'. . . Over the course of a decade, however, the term has lost all meaning. The problem for now is not whether we should foster independence in Korea.... In Hawaii independence was not fostered. In the Philippines independence was not fostered, nor in the Ryukyu islands nor in Taiwan. What reason could there be to foster indepen­dence in Korea?"69 Elsewhere he elaborated, "Isn't Japan trying to make Korea its protectorate [purotekutoreto] just as America has made of Hawaii and England of Egypt?" 70 KOtoku's disillusionment with Meiji's domestic settle­ment meshed with his sense of the emptiness of how the state employed inter­national terms. 71 Similar to hollow promises of freedom and equality within the Meiji system, KOtoku determined that independence was arbitrary as an international form.

In the months before Japan went to war with Russia over Korea, KOtoku wrote several articles for the Yorozu ChOhö explaining his position on Japan's policies in Korea.72 At first glance, his views appear to support a power-poli­tics equation of strong over weak, but deeper inspection reveals KOtoku's argument to be more subtle. He contended that the thrust of international terms should be reconfigured so that the inhabitants of a state—"the Korean people' not Korea—benefited from the exchange. In short, KOtoku's formula convulsed the underlying assumptions of international law. 73 An August 1903 article, "To Withdraw or To Annex?" (Höki ka Heidon ka), challenged Japan's policy as it then stood:74

Will the Korean race [ChOsen no jinrui] be able to look one morning into the bright light of constitutional politics or will they forever be enslaved by writhing barbarians? Shouldn't the development of Korea's heavenly endowed natural resources benefit the people's livelihood? Will they be forever left in the midst of wild desolation? Heaven has pre­sented us with this stark dilemma, put it on the shoulders of the Japa­nese people, and now the time has come for the Japanese people to resolve this matter.75

Citing Mutsu Munemitsu's stark treatise of state sovereignty to explain that it was Japan's duty to "annex" Korea, KOtoku then subverted the meaning of "annexation" by declaring that the state must not benefit at the expense of the people:

The standard for solving the Korean problem is not [predicated on] gain or loss for Korea's aristocracy or its governing officials. It exists only for the peace and welfare of mankind [ jinrui]. When all is said and done, shouldn't Korea's political affairs, Korea's economy, Korea's natural resources [exist] for the happiness of the Korean people [ChOsen jin-mm]? Should they do anything but profit the civilization of the Orien­tal races [TOyOjinrui]? Or mankind throughout the world [Sekai jin-rui]? Mencius said that things must benefit the people first and their ruler second. Withdrawal. If it should benefit mankind, then withdraw! Annexation. If it should benefit mankind, then annex! If it benefits mankind then it is not concerned with the gain or loss of the aristoc­racy or officials.76

KOtoku demanded that a nation's people should become the subjects of inter­national terms. He did not suggest that the masses carry out international relations, but rather contended that the promotion of their existence (both material and otherwise) should become the goal of policies in the interna­tional arena. He wrote, "I loathe those who take pleasure in the glory of the flag or in the expansion of national territory. I loathe those who want fame. It goes without saying that such a foreign policy is utterly despicable." 77

TARUI TOKICHI AND DAITO

In the late 1870s, a minor furor arose in Japan's Foreign Ministry over an "uninhabited island" (mujinto) that lay between Japan and Korea. Both the Japanese and Korean governments claimed the piece of rock as their country's territory, and formal diplomatic exchange revolved around procedures for shipwrecks and castaways.78 Fishing-industry entrepreneurs along the west­ern coastal areas of Japan and in the northern territories under Russian juris­diction beseeched their government to define the disputed islands as Japanese. For example, Toda Takayoshi of Shimane prefecture wrote a series of letters to the governor of Tokyo, Kusumoto Masashi, to urge "expanding the imperial lands to promote national interests [kOchi wo kakuchO shi kokueki wo oko-shil."79 The Matsushima Islands, as they are known in Japanese (and Ulle‑

92 fjapan's Colonization of Korea Voices of Dissent 93

ungdo in Korean), and the Takeshima/Tokdo group—known collectively on late-nineteenth-century European maps as the Hornet and Liancourt Rocks—formed the basis of this dispute. One fisherman wrote home from a Russian-occupied port and encouraged his government to "develop" (kaishaku) Matsu­shima. "Although the island is small' he wrote, "it is very profitable'8° These men and others spoke about the rich and vast quantities of fish around the islands, and they formulated their arguments in terms of national interest and prestige. They argued for new, expanded borders for Japan.

Unlike KOtoku's studied subversion of the meaning of "annexation' Tarui TOkichi's chance involvement in the dispute over these "uninhabited islands" reveals that Tarui—a less educated but equally politically inclined individual —also conceived of reformulating national borders in the same terms used by Meiji state aggrandizers, but with a wholly different object in mind. In 1878, Tarui visited friends in Tokyo for a few days, after he failed to join soldiers in northern Japan who were raising a rebellion against the new regime.8' Five years later, Tarui wrote about his trip and mentioned a conversation he had in Tokyo about an "uninhabited island" located off the western coast of Japan and toward Korea. 82Several scholars have drawn attention to Tarui's meeting in Tokyo, but none that I am aware of has connected his conversation with the Japanese-Korean island dispute occurring at the time, a conflict that appeared daily in the Japanese papers. The location of the island Tarui discussed with his friends almost matched the location of the fishermen's descriptions, which is important to understand in light of the new nation that Tarui decided to found several years later.83 Rather unimaginatively named "Great East" (Daitö), it is possible that Tarui intended at first to establish his country on this disputed speck of land, or, possibly, on an island near the one that today bears the name DaitO.

Whoever his informant was, and whatever the actual location of the island that he sought, Tarui made creative use of the rocks he was thinking about. He returned to Kyushu, and between 1878 and 1881, while teaching part-time at a Chinese studies school and working as a reporter for the Saga Shinbun, he sailed off into the waters between southern Japan and southern Korea four separate times in an effort to locate the site for his Daitö. Each time, he and his crew failed to find it.

On their first adventure, in December 1879, they were confused by the large number of tiny islands off the southern coast of Korea around Tongyung, and they decided to beach their boat.84 Korean villagers recognized the spruced-up raft as a foreign vessel and took its sailors to the local officials. Emphasiz­ ing heroics in his account, Tarui described how he and his crew used their motley guns and swords to escape and set sail again. This time, weather con­fused them, and when they sought refuge in a port on western Korea's Chölla Coast, officials seized them and their boat as they entered the harbor. Tarui told one of the officials that he "was on [his] way to see a friend in Shanghai." To another one, he said that he was from Tsushima and that he had intended to sail to the Ryukyu islands.1185 The Koreans consulted their manuals and determined what course of action to follow, agreeing finally to escort Tarui and his crew to Pusan and then send them back to Japan. Soon, however, the officials decided to free their catch, and Tarui retreated toward Kyushu in early January 1880.

Failure to locate the island dampened his spirits. Throughout the 1880s, Tarui's frustration with the world around him deepened as he watched the Meiji state co-opt supposedly egalitarian ideals into repressive instruments of its rule. His desire to find the "uninhabited island" had, I believe, nothing to do with fishing rights or national aggrandizement. Instead, as becomes clear from Tarui's writings about his imaginary nation, Tarui wanted to create a uto­pian, egalitarian state there. Back at home in northern Kyushu, Tarui involved himself in a variety of self-described progressive political movements that opposed the Meiji terms of rule. He attended meetings for months and remained unconvinced that even Itagaki Taisuke's Liberal Party (Jiyuto) was morally committed to an equal redistribution of wealth. And so, in May 1882, vowing a "morality of spirit," Tarui and Akamatsu Taisuke established the Oriental Society Party (Toyö Shakait6).86 Tarui and Akamatsu gathered fol­lowers at the Kotoji Temple near Nagasaki. About one hundred people came from Shimabara, where the temple was located, three came from Nagasaki, and one each came from Tokyo, Osaka, Niigata, and Saga. One of the few historians of modern Japan to note Tarui's party, historian E. H. Norman, described it as "one of the most interesting examples of [a] left-wing deriva­tive of the liberal movement.

'87 Norman pointed to the significance of choos­ing Shimabara, "since one of the last great uprisings against Tokugawa dom­ination took place there in the early seventeenth century."88 The founders inscribed the principles of "morality" (dOtoku) and "equality" (byOdo) in the party's charter and promised to strive for "the greater welfare of society's masses" (shakai köshü no saidaifukuri).89 Tarui's concern for other societies in the region manifested, itself in article five of the party's charter, which urged party members to publish Chinese-style (kanbun) versions of their publica­tions and distribute them in China and Korea. The following month, when the

94 Japan's Colonization of Korea Voices of Dissent 95

Meiji regime's home minister Yamada Akiyoshi learned of the group's exis­tence, he disbanded it on grounds that it disturbed the peace. Early the next winter, a Nagasaki court imprisoned Tarui for a month for printing copies of the organization's charter.

Tarui's sympathetic understanding of inequality within Japan led him nat­urally to understand the inequality in the ways that Europe and the United States grabbed at Asia. That being said, Tarui never seems to have made the critical connection between what Meiji aggrandizers ultimately wanted to do in Asia and what Americans and Europeans were also doing. Despite his lack of formal instruction in theories of social justice, Tarui encountered sufficient economic and political dislocation growing up in rural Nara, and later expe­riencing poverty when he moved to Tokyo in the year of the Ishin (1868), to inform his sensibilities to the extremes of wealth and power around him. A telling example of the precarious nature of his home life can be understood by considering the fact that, when he finally ran for parliament in 1892, he did so under the pseudonym of Morimoto Tökichi because his family was known in his home region for its constant state of bankruptcy. Tarui even published the first edition of his famous treatise—which I elaborate upon shortly—under the name Morimoto.90 Unlike thinkers such as Nakae ChOmin and Oi KentarO, who are remembered for their antigovernment positions, Tarui never received an education that might have rendered the use of his terms of oppo­sition referential or summoned the authority of European knowledge.9' Nakae and Oi, for example, used the term "equality" with clear quotation or invoca­tion of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. Tarui, on the other hand, used "equality" as if the concept in its Lockean sense had always been part of Japa­nese language and thought, a tendency that has left him subject to extremely different historiographic claims.

Adherents and detractors alike have labeled Tarui's thought eclectic and unsophisticated. This sentiment was best articulated by the famous social critic Tanaka Sogoro, who suggested that the influences on Tarui's thought resembled "a cocktail of Confucian and Buddhist teachings and contemporary European and American thought." 92Despite the hodgepodge nature of Tarui's ideas, Tanaka placed Tarui at the center of his genealogical pantheon of think­ers who envisioned egalitarian possibilities for modern Japan. Oddly enough, however, Tanaka scarcely mentioned his protagonist's lifelong concern for Asia, paying scant attention in his 1930 biography to Tarui's renowned essay proposing the unification of Japan and Korea. The book's frontispiece (Fig. 5) did afford some reference to Tarui's zeal for Asia by reprinting a photograph of him, centered against the background of a copy of a letter he wrote to the Korean king appealing for assistance in the unification of Japan and Korea.

On the other hand, the in-house historians of the notorious Pan-Asianist Black Dragon Society (Kokuryükai) accorded Tarui the honor of having for­mulated the "first policy that strove for the general safety and well-being of East Asia'93 The stench of Pan-Asianism from this group's affection for Tarui continues to render his legacy highly suspicious, and several historians have denounced him as the progenitor of Japan's "invasionistic" thought.94

In 1884, when several French navy ships opened fire on the Chinese port

Image

FIGURE S. Photograph of Tarui Tökichi on the frontis of a 1930 biography.

96 apan's Colonization of Korea Voices of Dissent 97

city of Fuzhou, Tarui's sense of Asia as a victim of Euro-American conquest intensified into a commitment to revolt. After the French bombardment,

Tarui went to Fuzhou to participate in the resistance. From there, he moved

to Shanghai, where he helped establish a school—the East Asia Academy (Töa Gakka n) —sponsored by the Tokyo-based Asian Development Society (KOa‑

kai). Under the direction of the self-described nationalist/Asjanjst Suehiro

Tetchö, Tarui worked at the school for a year with colleagues who included Baba Tatsui, Nakae Chomin, Sugita Teiichi, and Hiraoka Kotarö, until finan‑

cial problems forced the school's closure. In 1885, Tarui returned to Osaka,

where he made new friends such as Oi KentarO through his Shanghai acquain­tance with the Korean reformer Kim Okkyun, who had just returned to Japan

after fleeing a recently failed coup attempt in Seoul.95 Tarui soon joined Oi Kentaro's scheme to sail from Osaka and invade Korea, winning over the Korean government by distributing translations of Rousseau and Mill—a plan that could not have been more different from the Meiji government's Con­quer Korea debates a decade earlier. Osaka police discovered the plot before the ship left port and imprisoned the group's organizers. Tarui served only a few months in jail, but while there he drafted what remains the original plans for his imaginary state, DaitO. In at least the rewritten version of the essay that he later published, he crystallized his efforts to create an Asia-centered, socially egalitarian political body at this time.

That Tarui celebrated Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910 should in no way be effaced. In his younger days, he appears to have been ignorant of, or blind to, the obstacles posed by the already unequal relationship between Japan and Korea, or perhaps he believed that these obstacles represented an insignificant threat to the formation of an egalitarian nation. His preoccupation with designating a legal term for the nation he wanted to establish points to the shortcomings of simply weighing Tarui's thought according to where it fell on the political spectrum. Osaka police destroyed the initial draft of Tarui TOki-chi's Treatise on the Unification of Great East (Daitô Gapporon) when he was released from jail in 1885, but he rewrote and published the essay several years later in the form that has become known to many readers.96 Tarui's vision of Daitö incorporated a variety of positions, but fundamentally he blended a pro­found concern for creating egalitarian politics with an abstract empathy for other Asian nations. Furthermore, he insisted that his vision of society meshed legally with international law.

Although the incidents were not at all connected, the negotiations between ItO Hirobumi and Li Hongzhang discussed in the previous chapter were occurring in Tianjin at the same time that Tarui was in jail writing his treatise. Considering the events together, however, brings into greater clarity Tarui TOkichi's unusual contribution to Meiji political discourse. At the arms reduc­tion talks in Tianjin, ItO emphasized to the Chinese diplomats that the govern­ment of Japan intended to conduct diplomatic intercourse with all nations—including Britain and China—in the terminology of international law. In his treatise, Tarui stressed that his DaitO belonged to the same discourse. For Tarui, by invoking the same terms of law, it was possible to envision an order­ing of relations among Japan, Korea, and China that was radically different from what Ito proposed as "Japanese policy." Ito understood "equality," for example, as the term that officially—and, therefore, untouchably—governed relations among sovereign independent states and only those defined as such. In contrast, Tarui saw potential in these same terms as the genesis for the har­monious interdependence of all political bodies.

Because Tarui's proposal would have eradicated Japan itself, he posed no small threat to how the government defined the country, but it is clear from his essay that Tarui's goal was possible within the limits of international terms as he defined them. His political reconfiguration of Japan and Korea would first have extinguished the separately perceived sovereignty of both Japan and Korea. Together as DaitO, the nations would have assumed a unitary existence. Unlike the terms of the 1905 protectorate agreement the Meiji government later established over Korea, Tarui saw the ultimate (though not immediate) erasure of a hierarchical distinction between the two components of his new country. He envisaged "Great East" as a utopian place of equality, not only within its geographic borders but also as a state that would join equally in fed­erated alliances with China to stave off the acquisitive desires of the Europeans and Americans. Tarui imagined his nation as an egalitarian state in which the countries would need to overcome the unequal social and economic condi‑

tions that prevailed in Japan and Korea at the time. He described the merger as initially "unprofitable" for Japan, but, believing in his utopia, he proclaimed,

"that which profits Korea profits Japan, and that which profits Japan profits Korea' Unfortunately for Tarui's dreams, the book did not sway hordes of followers. In fact, not until twenty years later—after Japan's official annexa­tion of Korea in 1910—did the book even attract a measurable readership.

The desired audience of Tarui's book was clear: he published the text in kanbun with the express intent of making it more accessible to Korean read‑

ers. Relying on the reputation he had gained as a parliamentary representative from the short-lived Oriental Liberal Party (TOyO JiyutO) in the early 1890s,

98 rJapan's Colonization of Korea Voices of Dissent 99

Tarui published his treatise in 1893. Naming the new nation profoundly con­cerned him, and he devoted the second section of his essay to the problem. Quoting The Analects, he wrote:

It is said that, "If the name is not correct, words lose their order?' It is also said that, "a name is the guest of its substance.". . . First, I will clar­ify the name, and then examine how the substance accords with the name." 98

He elaborated:

My main point is to cause Japan and Korea to form a single, unified country. There would be nothing misleading about calling my plan "the Union of Japan and Korea?' However, if we want to create a unified sub­stance, we must resolutely turn away from this method. In both past and present times, disputes have arisen from heated disagreements over the placement and hierarchy of names [in a title]. For example, the Adriat-ics and the Romans formed an alliance and conquered Macedonia. A poet celebrated [the victory] with a triumphal song, but in the verses of this poem he placed the Adriatics ahead of the Romans. Discord devel­oped between the two countries, and they began fighting. This deserves consideration, especially in the case of the name for a newly established nation.

More important, it was fundamental to Tarui that his national project be understood internationally. He was adamant that Daito accord to the terms of international law:

Equality for both sides is truly the principle of exchange. International law does not posit [national] hierarchies based on territorial size or the size of populations. I will not rely on the old names for the countries, and [in] the hope of avoiding any discrimination, I will designate the two countries under a [new] unified name: DaitO. In the federated countries of Europe as well, the name of each state [continues to] exist while a general name overarches [all]. Should the two countries unify now and use Daitö to name them both while also continuing to use their respective old names, they will avoid discord amongst themselves.99

In light of the fact that men such as Uchida Ryohei, leader of the Black Dragon Society, wrote paeans to him, it is difficult even to want to see Tarui in a dif­ferent light. His spastic attempts to form alliances with Korean progressives

(such as Kim Okkyun) in the 1880s, however, embodied his concern for cre­ating a viable resistance to what he saw as the wholly racist and destructive imperialist policies that the United States and the European countries were perpetrating in Asia. Tarui believed that he could overcome borders and cre­ate a better political body by choosing "the correct name" for the amalgama­tion of Korea and Japan. Moreover, he evoked the "teachings of international law" as the legitimating means with which to effect the "harmonious unity" he envisioned. Daitô negated both Japan and Korea. Although the government first discarded and then shelved Tarui's ideas, they resurrected and praised his foresight after Japan officially erased Korea in its own terms.

The process of bringing together these disparate voices is difficult because they are rife with incompatibility. Class difference alone, for example, likely would have prevented the Korean immigrants from sharing a meal with the Righteous leader whose cause they espoused. Together, however, these individ­uals all encountered an impasse, which bonded their actions. The inability to use international terms for purposes that differed from the limits that Japan ascribed to them underscores the historical condition that only authentically recognized regimes registered in international law at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the interna­tional arena brims with examples of disconnected voices using international terms in ways not defined by the world's recognized authentic regimes. From former sex slaves of the Japanese Imperial Army to the unknown leaders of the recognized twenty-two million refugees in motion on the planet, it is unde‑

niable that terms such as equality, independence, and sovereignty continue to inspire hope to those who rail against perceived injustice.100 The problem

remains of who is able—or who is recognized as able—to define meaning for these terms. The next chapter does not answer this problem, but in a related way it examines how modern Japan's internal reordering of law interacted with the nation's ability to display its empire as legitimate.

Mission Legislatrice 101

CHAPTER 5

MISSION LEGISLATRICE

The international politics of imperialism taught Meiji state aggrandizers that, if they were to gain full legitimacy in Korea as an enlightened exploiter, they should establish new legal codes in their protectorate. Before annexing Korea in 1910, in the absence of formalizing a Japanese code of law for Korea, Japa­nese colonial rulers realized that they ought to at least convey a desire and a plan to do so in international terms.' In short, Japan needed to demonstrate that it had embarked on a legislating mission—a mission legislatrice—to Korea.2 Japan's endeavor to make Korea legal in the eyes of the international community at the time brings into relief a forgotten, yet highly revealing, com­ponent of the process of the annexation. Although the Powers declared Korea illegal in 1907, the same group declared Japan's Korea fully legal in 1913, when Japan abrogated extraterritorial privileges in Korea and submitted its nation­als to the terms it established there.

At the turn of the last century, the few remaining threads of Western extra­territoriality in Japan pertained to civil codes, particularly business practices. The demand to implement and sustain extensive extraterritorial privileges originated from what can best be understood as an "imperialist gaze" that was focused on Japan's criminal and penal codes.3 Western heads turned at the sight of heads of executed criminals on stakes.4 In their horror at this specta­cle, so-called enlightened merchants and travelers from Europe and the United States often failed to remember that their safety was maintained by the con­stant threat from their countries' cannon-laden ships.

In the 1850s, it was always easier for American and European imperialists to judge the "uncivilized" as "barbaric," "unchristian," or "cannibalistic" and forget the large-scale violence that accompanied and privileged their own adventures. Half-a-century later, Japan was participating fully in the terms and practices of this discourse. As we have seen in other examples, the interna­tional arena's failure to credit Korea as more than a pawn of China, Russia, and finally Japan routinely benefited Japan's actions there. The world, for example, paid no appreciable attention to King Kojong's declaration of Korean sover­eignty in 1897 or renaming himself as Korea's emperor. Conversely, in 1907, when the world paid attention to Korea in the wake of the incident at The Hague, it was only to applaud Japan's actions there.

Most important, with respect to the discussion that follows, the world paid no measurable attention to the Korean judicial restructuring in the 1890s, which, among other things, enabled Ho Wi to serve on Seoul's new high court and begin making decisions in international terms in the first place.5 The world's failing thus kept Korea in a state of suspension in the imperialist's gaze. For many, Japan's well-known, newly achieved levels of civilization could only benefit the Koreans. Stories concerning Korea's "barbaric" ways of dealing with criminals—burying some murderers alive up to their necks, then kicked in the head and devoured by insects—compounded this logic.6 The international arena's collective belief that "civilized" legal codes would uplift the world's "heathen' or at least make them manageable, comprised, therefore, an addi­tional element of how Japan could display its control of Korea, and this chap­ter describes how Japan demonstrated its legislating mission to Korea in such terms. The process ultimately led the world to confirm full status on Japan among the world's legitimate imperialists when the Powers abrogated their own privileges of extraterritoriality in Korea and subjected their nationals to Japan's laws there. In addition, however, Japanese colonizers simultaneously justified the need to maintain less than "civilized" procedures—specifically, flogging—to control their charges, the Koreans.7 Seen in a different light, an observation made by The Times of London when Japan overthrew the Korean emperor in 1907 bespoke the self-satisfied international sentiment of the day with respect to this seeming paradox: "We can easily appreciate the position of the Japanese in Korea?'8

In 1907 the Koreans' disastrous mission to The Hague only encouraged further Japanese control of Korea. In particular, the international community

praised Japan's new legislating mission.9 As mentioned earlier, reports from London explained Japan's co-option of the Korean judiciary by writing, "Mar­quis Ito's first measure aims at securing life and property in Korea by substi­tuting pure and competent tribunals of justice for the present and unskilled

100

102 Japan's Colonization of Korea YVlission Legislatrice 103

law Courts. "10 A hurdle arose, however. With Japan now legally legislating Korea, the question of whether what were sometimes awkwardly called "for­eign foreigners" in Korea—Americans, English, French, and so forth—would recognize Japan as their "pure and competent" ruler, too, or whether they would continue to demand their long-standing privileges of extraterritoriality. Japanese legal and state theorists knew that, if the "foreign foreigners" main­tained such restrictions in Korea, the Powers would not fully recognize Japan's rule. In 1882, the United States promised Korea that, once Korean judicial pro­cedure and codes "conformed to the laws of the United States' it would erad­icate special privileges for its nationals there." The United States, therefore, held a particularly important role in judging Japan's sovereignty over its colo­nial prize. Ultimately, Japan's performative display of why the Powers should abandon extraterritoriality in Korea cemented Japan's control of Korea in international terms.

Before analyzing the terms of Japan's legislating mission to Korea, it is helpful to consider two photographs the Meiji government distributed in the period prior to the annexation in 1910, which elucidates the larger, discur­sive strategy at play. The Japanese colonial regime's 1907 Report on Reforms included glossy pictures that illustrated the legitimacy of its rule in Korea to readers around the world. Some photos (Fig. 6) featured the new law courts—such as the new "Court of Cassation" (High Court of Appeal) in Seoul—in order to display the fruits of Japan's zeal. 12

Image

FIGURE 6. Court of Cassation, Seoul, 1907

The visual "Europeanness" of the building challenged the viewer to imag­ine anything identifiably "Japanese" about Japanese rule in Korea. For a reader familiar with Tokyo at the time, though, the structure would not have been surprising. Architecture inspired by Euro-American influences had become standard for major government buildings in Tokyo by the turn of the cen-tury.13 In Seoul at the time, as well, Korean progressives—both for and against Japan—sponsored a number of very un-Korean structures in the city. The Independence Movement's own 1898 Arc de Triomphe, built to commemo­rate Korea's independence from China, dominated the city's skyline to the northwest, where today it seems small. To visually convey their power, gov­ernments that maintained extraterritorial privileges in Seoul—the United States, France, Britain, Russia, and others—spent huge sums on lavish, non-Korean-style consulates.14 And in the southern section of the city, the Japa­nese Resident General's headquarters rose high on a hill within a large Euro­pean-style building, towering over the single-story Korean houses below.

Despite these non-Korean buildings in Seoul, however, the new, massive, French-influenced Japanese Court of Cassation, in neo-Renaissance style, did not merge quietly into the landscape when it was built near a palace in down­town Seoul. As philosopher Gilles Deleuze might have phrased it, the build­ing's "assemblage" invaded all prevailing proportions and attracted the kind of attention needed by a dominator to simultaneously secure and display its con­trolling position.15 The photograph published in the Japanese regime's Report, however, would have obscured any possible concern that the Japanese were "invading" the landscape, because the photograph was cropped to block out any surrounding buildings. However, whether the Japanese colonial regime intended this photograph to obfuscate the "noticeability" of the structure is not the point. The producers of this Report—and subsequent ones as well—conveyed a sense of the colonial, "anywhere" quality of this building through such photographs, confirming the universality of the Japanese endeavor.

The following year's Report included a page of smaller pictures, which went right to the heart of the universal terms of Japan's legislating mission to Korea.16 An updated photograph (Fig. 7) of the now-opened Court of Cas-sation and one of the newly built, Japanese-run prisons in Seoul sandwich "before" and "after" photographs depicting trial proceedings. The "before" picture—in pre-Japanese Korea—features a magistrate flanked by advisors and seated in front of closed doors, listening to someone read charges from a scroll at his feet. Eight officials beneath him surround the two offenders /plain‑

Image Mission Legislatrice 105

  tiffs, who squat on the dirt with their heads bowed. Most of the men wear long, white robes and hats that define their rank.17

The image against which this scene is juxtaposed—the "after" picture—shows a sun-filled, white room. "Scientifically sanitized rule has come to Korea' the picture seems to shout. The judges, six men in dark Western suits, sit behind a long wooden bench. Their nationality is difficult to ascertain because no names are listed, and Japan's judicial rules permitted qualified Koreans to serve. The "Koreanness" of the defendants, however, is clear. Five men stand directly in front of the judges and wear the typical white shirts and pants of Korean commoners. All but one wears his long hair in the traditional top-knot. By contrast, a supposedly neutral, universal dress code of moder­nity costumes the judges. Three policemen sit near the Koreans, and the court clerk sits sideways between the judges and the offenders, recording the words spoken over his head. The sprawling new prison pictured at the bottom of the page confirms that the colonial regime was already sentencing people. Two years before annexation brought the issue of extraterritoriality to the fore, such images conveyed Japan's position to fellow imperialist nations in the confluent terms of colonial control.

  THE "FATHER OF MODERN JAPANESE LAW"

  In the 1870s and 1880s, the Meiji government's French legal advisor in Tokyo concocted the formula that ultimately released Japan from extraterritorial restrictions. Examining how he did so sheds light on often-overlooked con­nections between legal terms and international power. In keeping with the early Meiji passion to "seek enlightened knowledge from throughout the world' in 1873 Justice Minister EtO Shinpei dispatched a group of young bureaucrats to Paris, where they listened to Gustave Boissonade lecture on criminal and civil codes. The group was so impressed—or so confused—by what Boissonade told them that he was immediately offered a job as a consult­ant to draft Japan's new legal codes. Initially hired for three years, Boissonade remained in Tokyo for the next two decades, securing his place in legal history as the "father of modern Japanese law."8 He began his work on criminal codes and, during the late 1870s, drew up a system of laws and procedures based largely on his country's 1810 Napoleonic Code. As described earlier, legal scholar Mitsukuri RinshO remembered his frustrations at trying to render these same codes into Japanese before Boissonade came to Japan—in the pre-Meiji days of "no annotations, no glossaries, no instructors." Once Boissonade

FIG U R E 7. Photographs illustrating Japan's Mission Législatrice in Korea, 1909  

106 Japan's Colonization of Korea Mission Legislatrice 107

was in Tokyo, however, Mitsukuri and others at the Ministry of Justice readily sought his advice. The young legal scholars translated Boissonade's final prod­uct as Japan's new criminal codes, which were promulgated in 1880 and put into force in 1882.

His 1870 resume reveals that, although Boissonade was a scholar of mod­ern comparative law, he was not a gifted linguist. He had the ability to read English but not speak it ("Lit l'anglais, leparlepeu").19 Boissonade would have known Latin and possibly Greek (his father was one of the most famous clas‑

Image

FIGURE 8. Gustave Boissonade, the Father of Japanese Law

sicists in France), because the entrance examinations to the legal profession in France at the time demanded competency in the classics. The breadth and depth of his language skills is more than just a petty detail, because during the twenty years Boissonade spent advising and instructing the Meiji government in the uses and meanings of European legal terminology, the "father of mod­ern Japanese law" did not know Japanese well. Rather than seeing this as a defect on Boissonade's part, however, it is more useful to consider it as a meas­ure of how foreign language study had expanded in Japan. Only ten years after the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime, foreign advisors such as Boissonade taught young Meiji students and politicians arcane legal concepts in their native tongues, because the formerly hidden European languages—once even heretical—had become useful elements of modern practical knowledge.

Both the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs employed Boissonade for different purposes, but he did not simply sit at his desk wait­ing for orders. Meiji politicians, bureaucrats, and students consulted him widely on contemporary and historical issues of European legal and political thought, and he responded with highly opinionated and often unsolicited evaluations. Almost immediately on his arrival in Japan in 1874, for example, Minister of Foreign Affairs Okubo Toshimichi sought Boissonade's advice over a dispute with China, whereupon Boissonade joined the official entourage to Beijing to give shipboard lectures on international law.20 In the wake of the Conquer Korea debates at the time, ItO Hirobumi sought his advice concern­ing the course of Japan's Korean policy. With the encouragement of students of French law, Boissonade began teaching classes at the Ministry of Justice's Legal Academy, courses that eventually formed the basic curriculum at the Law School of Tokyo Imperial University.

In the freedom of this atmosphere, Boissonade issued his most critical mandate to the Japanese government: if the Meiji regime did not immediately abolish the practice of torturing prisoners in Japan, the "Western Powers" would not begin to abolish their privileges of extraterritoriality in Japan. Young legal scholars embraced Boissonade's formula, determining that Japan needed to eradicate its practice of torture-on-display to be considered a fully "independent" nation. Boissonade could not have been more axiomatic in his explanation. On 15 April 1875, he wrote a blunt letter to Minister of Justice Oki Takato: "Mortifying scenes occur every day [in the prison] without any attempt to conceal them. This takes place next to a school of law, opposite the offices of the Ministry of Justice—as if these acts were not contrary to law and justice itself. . . . Should I not be apprised of some Imperial Act to amend this

108 rJapan's Colonization of Korea STVfission Legislatrice 109

outrage against humanity and slight to reason, I shall have to leave the Min­istry of Justice. "21 A month later, Boissonade presented the unresponsive Oki

with an ultimatum: that the Japanese government end the use of torture

against prisoners in the country's jails, or he would leave Japan at once.22 Boissonade emphasized that continuing the practice of torture was contrary

to Japan's interests because, as he wrote, the Meiji regime had "promised [the

European ministers] it would abolish torture. Until this is accomplished, Japan cannot pretend to begin serious negotiations about obtaining jurisdiction over

foreigners." 23 The emperor responded and limited the randomness with

which torture could be used, and in 1879 Japan formally abolished the prac­tice of torturing prisoners. Like other advisors, Boissonade viewed Japan as a

promising student but made it clear that some bodies were still more civi‑

lized—less colonizable—than others. France's citizens would not succumb to Japanese law until it could be measured as civilized by their terms. Meiji politi‑

cians and legal theorists understood that as long as extraterritorial spaces existed for foreigners within Japan, the country was not a full sovereign state according to international law.

Boissonade contributed mightily to Japanese conceptualization of these

issues, and his success as the "father of modern Japanese law"—the reason he is so fondly remembered to this day—comes from his having integrated him‑

self as an element of Meiji modernization. He confidently claimed his role as

the bearer of civilization to Japan, the civilizer who provided the terms of legal modernity. Earlier Tokugawa-era "expel the barbarian" rhetoric, for example,

underscored how extraterritorial privileges restricted what nativists described

as an inviolable national entity.24 Meiji nationalists subsequently learned, however, to argue for the eradication of these privileges in international terms.

Increasing knowledge of what the new terms entailed afforded the ability to

debate the extraterritorials (as it were) in their own terms. They protested extraterritoriality as an infringement on the sovereignty of their independent

nation, and Boissonade encouraged their actions. In 1882, Boissonade pub‑

lished a thousand-page commentary on Japanese criminal procedure under the new laws, and in the forward to this mammoth tome, he described what

he saw as the logical evolution of Japan's course of self-civilizing: "For our pur‑

poses, in drafting this Schemata for the criminal Codes and also for the civil Codes, we have preserved and held in view as our main objective the prepa‑

ration of the complete independence of Japan with respect to Jurisdiction. By introducing these Laws, we have accomplished this. At the same time, under our Tutelage, we have instilled principles of justice and natural reason which

are the honor of modern times and which remove all plausible grounds, even pretexts, for Extraterritoriality.1125 Should Boissonade's efforts bear fruit as he thought they would, he conceded that even civilized bodies could be confident that they would be treated with the "honor of modern times' Extraterritori­ality would be unnecessary.

Boissonade's vision of himself as a vital but objective participant in the modernization of Japan was entwined with a belief that he imported univer­sal knowledge. Like the terms of international law, the French criminal codes that Boissonade explicated to Meiji jurists and students presumed their own universality, and he himself made a point of diminishing the "Frenchness" of Japan's new codes: "Whatever legitimates our national pride with regards to the French Codes, which have so often been imitated in Europe and America, we must recognize that, in many respects, today they are no longer on a level with modern science and practical, daily needs.. . . We have modified what was recognized to be defective, although we have guarded against rash innovation, we have avoided blindly following routine. 1126

For Boissonade, a universal norm that required no elaboration inscribed what linguist Roland Barthes might have described as a naturalized "horizon" line, and under Boissonade's "tutelage' Japan's new codes blended seamlessly into that line.27 He elaborated this point to justify why the existence of the new codes in Japan necessitated the eradication of extraterritoriality: "Moreover, if these new Codes are destined one day to be applied to foreigners residing in Japan, it is good that they are not of an overly particular national character. It is good that they offer, above all, a sort of common international law, shel­tered from traditional prejudices and systematical criticism and from which nations, except on occasion, are no longer exempt'28 Boissonade postulated that the Meiji regime could display its participation in a thoroughly univer­sal mean to the nations of the world. His own pomposity aside, Boissonade arguably wanted to bring about the end of degrading restrictions in Japan. His reasoning suggested to readers in Europe or America—in terms they under-stood—that the Powers would be safe to dissolve their extralegal zones in Japan, because terms that were familiar to them now prevailed.

LAWLESS AND LEGAL KOREA

Japanese officials worked to ensure that their legalizing mission was perceived as a success before the annexation took place. As Japan increasingly extended its rule in Korea, Japanese opinion makers sought to depict pre-Japanese

110 gapan's Colonization of Korea Mission Legislatrice III

Korea to both international and domestic audiences as a place entirely devoid of law. At the same time—and also following international practice—such descriptions allowed that, although Korea did have some criminal codes, they were random and exceedingly dangerous, worse than no law at all. Once Japan secured the 1905 protectorate agreement, however, legal theorists swiftly began to suggest that foreign foreigners should soon be at ease because Japa­nese law would prevail in Korea. When Japan took over the judiciary, in 1907, promoters of Japan's enlightening role explained that legal codes there would be consistent with those in Japan. According to the logic of colonization, Japan's Korea could then be declared legal like Japan, a place the Powers could determine to be "civilized" by erasing their extraterritorial privileges there.

Japanese colonial boosters explained the progress made by their legal mis­sionaries to assuage any civilized concern about conducting business or affairs in Korea now that the enlightened exploiters were making progress. In addi­tion to photographs, the 1907 Report on Reforms on Progress in Korea offered a brief summary of recent events. The authors of the Report allowed that "the historical conditions which existed at the time [in Korea] when the [initial] treaties [between Korea and other nations] were concluded [meant that] it was

quite natural that civilized nations should have wished to make their consular jurisdiction as extensive as possible."29 They now pointed, however, to "the

progressive tide of reforms" Japan's legal messengers sponsored as reason for a "greatly diminished" need for apprehension. Anthropologist Bernard Cohn's assessment of late-eighteenth-century British views of India is instructive for placing Japanese descriptions of Korea a century later:

Although it was recognized that there was "law" in India, that "law" was believed to be different from the European kind. . . the model of the Mughal-Indian political system was absolute and arbitrary power, unchecked by any institution, social or political, and resting in the per­son of the emperor, with property and honors derived solely from the will of the despotic ruler. . . . Justice was dependent not on the rule of law but on the rule of men, who could be influenced by money, status, and exercise in their office of judge. The idea that "despots" had ruled India was revalorizecl in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as one of several ruling paradigms that formed the ideological infrastructure of British rule in India. In its cleaned-up version it was expressed thus: Indians are best ruled by a "strong-hand," who could administer justice in a rough-and-ready fashion unfettered by rules and regulations. Their

courts, their procedures, their regulations, and the propensity of Indians to perjury and the suborning of witnesses only served to delay justice. 30

According to the Japanese colonial regime in Seoul, Japan shared England's difficulties. Civil procedures, the colonizers believed, existed minimally at best, and criminal codes were unmentionable:

The Koreans had little or no conception of private rights as were under­stood elsewhere in the Orient. Thus, when such maladministration existed for so long a time that public officials were accustomed to pay only scant respect to the private rights of the people, and the latter, on their side, dared not complain against official extortion. In short, civil law guaranteeing private rights had practically no existence.... [J]udges and procurators, being utterly deficient in legal knowledge and training, often delivered wrong judgments.... Prison administration as hereto­fore carried out in Korea is a matter almost too unsavory to describe. The most common form[s] of punishment were beating, imprison­ment, and confinement in the stocks. The Penal Code is full of direc­tions for administering floggings, which were often so severe as to ren­der the victim crippled for life, if he did not die under the infliction.3'

Paralleling Cohn's ventriloquized British colonizer denouncing "their courts, their procedures, their regulations' the Japanese removed themselves to a position that mandated that the Koreans were eminently colonizable in Japan's new "pure and competent tribunals of justice." More important, the Report implied, non-Koreans could now be sure of their safety.

The English-language Report thus reflected what had been taking place in Japanese descriptions of the situation in Korea for quite some time, particu­larly in the legal profession's newspaper, the Höritsu Shinbun.32 In 1900, edi­tor Takagi Masutarö first published the HOritsu Shinbun as a weekly paper but soon increased its printing to six times a month, and it remained in circula­tion until 1945. Called the "Edoko Defender' Takagi represented the Nihon-bashi section of Tokyo in parliament. The subject matter of his newspaper was often too specialized for the mass-circulation presses, and so he secured an important niche as well as a constant readership. Articles regularly followed Justice Ministry proclamations and reforms. Moreover, and of particular importance to Japan's annexation of Korea, the paper routinely reported the activities of Japanese lawyers, judges, and professors who embarked on legis­lating missions throughout Japan's growing empire. Thus, part of this news‑

112 gapan's Colonization of Korea Mission Legislatrice 113

paper's value to history is that it described the human element involved in writing Japan's laws abroad—for our concerns, Japan's laws in Korea. Like the Foreign Ministry documents that record the names of translators involved in explaining Japan's new diplomatic techniques, the HOritsu Shinbun gave per­sonality to an otherwise impersonal transformation of international relations. In May and June 1908, for example, the paper printed the names of judges hired by the new Japanese-run Korean Supreme Court.34 Chief Justices from Wakayama, Matsue, Akita, and Naha were among those who served. Although not famous in most histories of modern Japan, those who also went off to Korea to spread the word of modern law included Sasaki Genosuke, a judge from Yamagata; Fujiwara SaburO, a Nagano prosecutor; and Ishikawa Tada­shi, from the Osaka appellate court.35

Notably, various articles make it clear that Japan started to reorder Korea's judiciary even prior to the July 1907 agreement, when it became official. In the spring of 1906, the Ministry of Justice in Tokyo dispatched Ume KenjirO to Korea to write new civil codes and Kuratomi YuzaburO to work on the criminal codes. The ministry appointed Ume with confidence. Born in 1860 in Matsue, he embodied the archetypal early-Meiji-era student depicted in stories such as Tokutomi KenjirO's Omoide no Ki.36 Poor and brilliant, he advanced rapidly through his French-language studies at the Tokyo Foreign Language School and then at the Justice Ministry's Law School, where Bois-sonade taught. Before joining the law faculty of Tokyo Imperial University, the Ministry of Education sent him to Lyon, where, to the overwhelming pride of the Ministries of Justice and Education in Tokyo, he won the university's Ver­meil Prize for an outstanding doctoral dissertation.37 Ume rose to the occasion of his mission to Korea and, in good Napoleonic fashion, compiled reams of customary procedures as he traveled throughout the country.38

On the other hand, the Ministry's appointment of Kuratomi YuzaburO reveals another international imperialist practice that Tokyo put to use in its

new colonies: Kuratomi was an upper-class disciplinary problem. Two months before he was sent to Korea, the Tokyo Lawyers' Association and the Japan Lawyers' Association had jointly reprimanded him for gross mishandling of the Hibiya Riots trial in his role as chief prosecutor.39 These groups may have seen the task of creating a new criminal justice system in Korea in and of itself as the perfect punishment.

The overall tone of the Höritsu Shinbun's articles concerning criminal jus­tice in Korea ascribed a sense of maturity to the late-Meiji-era legal system by routine, yet subtle, comparisons to Korean forms of criminal jurisprudence.

Reporters described Korean practices as "barbaric" and "uncivilized" and relied on the international discourse of enlightened exploitation to imply why such conditions necessitated some sort of "civilization" process. In the 1870s, for example, Boissonade made it clear that contemporary European criminal theory overwhelmingly condemned the practice of beheading, explaining—albeit perversely—that hanging was the accepted civilized means of execu­tion. Articles in the Höritsu Shinbun in the spring of 1905, for example, described at length Korea's barbaric execution practices: "In Korea, a country with which we have friendly and close relations, even now in the civilized twentieth century people are beheaded like pigs'40 By the time of the article's publication, in May 1905, hanging had been standard procedure in Japan for three decades.4' The article describing the apparently barbaric Koreans also conceded that there were occasional hangings in Korea, but this was conveyed in an aside that recounted the events of a recent evening in which thirty-six criminals were hanged en masse while another prisoner was beheaded in front of them all.42 According to articles of this ilk, prisoners lived in wretched tiny cells, and "according to Korean law repeated theft [meant] the death pen-alty."43 Reporters of conditions in Korea—as well as those in Taiwan and Mainland China—apparently had no interest in reminding readers of not-so-old practices in Japan, because its current methods were accepted as com­mon sense. According to the HOritsu Shinbun, Japan's legal professionals were working manifestations of Fukuzawa Yukichi's 1885 mandate to "leave Asia' only at the beginning of the twentieth century they had come to full circle to bear civilization there.'

Articles in the HOritsu Shinbun point to how Japanese legal theorists incor­porated European notions of criminal anthropology—particularly phrenol-ogy—into their new conceptions of criminal law. In Europe, around the time Boissonade left for Tokyo, reports flourished of savage behavior among "natives" in places that Europeans related to through an imperialist gaze. In those places, reports of such savage behavior intersected with other discus­sions of degeneracy among the poor masses spawned by industrialization in urban areas. Social thinkers advocated for what French social philosopher H. A. Fregier termed the "dangerous classes?'45 So-called experts, particularly medical ones, came to be involved in "repairing" criminals.46 In France in par­ticular, society "moved towards the practice.. . of calculating punishment not in terms of the crime, but the psychology and circumstances of the individual criminal?'47 Discussions of criminal deviance widely appeared in newspapers, and criminal legal proceedings drew large crowds of spectators. Simultane‑

114 rJapan's Colonization of Korea Mission Legislatrice 115

ously defining oneself as not criminal as well as someone who participated in the reform of a criminal marked a person as civilized—that is, not native, not colonizable. Reforming criminals in terms of "the psychology and circum­stances of the individual criminal" rendered civilized societies distinct from the far-flung colonial places where "dangerous" people lived.48

A 1906 article in the Hôritsu Shinbun, for example, featured a sketch of a man's head partitioned and labeled with "iroha" characters (alphabet let­ters) .49 Next to the drawing, a key explains what each letter designates, descrip­tive human traits such as "secrecy," "sexual instinct," and "temporal sense," and the accompanying article underscores the importance of knowing the passionate composition of the human brain in relation to criminal law. His­torians Umemori Naoyuki and Daniel Botsman have separately argued that Tokugawa philosopher Nakai Riken's late-eighteenth-century proposal for a "long-term jail" foreshadowed Meiji criminal theory by advocating the need to reform criminals individually.50 Meiji European-inspired theories of know­ing the criminal mind built on this process by blending the so-called truths of contemporary racial and gender typology with psychological sciences, adding distinctively new elements to Meiji prescriptions for reforming criminals. Reforming a "primitive type' for example, now required colonizing knowl-edge.51 Japan's legislating missionaries to Korea brought codes with them that enabled these lawyers and scholars to preserve themselves and Japan as dis­crete from the places to which they bore their civilization. And this particular aspect of Japanese imperialism must always be reiterated, because it enabled Japan to colonize what much of the world looked upon as the same types of peoples.

Japanese legal missionaries to Korea increasingly began to publicize the wide range of their efforts to readers at home. Articles reported, for example, how "the judicial reform advance party [senpatsu]" in Korea worked to estab­lish 125 courts and 9 prisons (8 to accord with 8 local courts and 1 for exiles on a remote island)—all before annexation. Moreover, as occasional reports described, Japanese worked together with Koreans to rewrite Korean codes and even convened a Korean Judiciary Friendship Association (Kankoku HOsö Konwakai) in the process.52 In August 1909—a full year before the official colonization—criminal-code reformer Kuratomi YuzaburO sent a long arti­cle back to Japan providing his "Summary of the Korean Judicial System,

"53

In respectful fashion, he emphasized that Japanese and Korean officials had worked in harmony to reform and build on the Korean system established in the "third year of the Kwangmu reign" (1899). He described the current trans‑

formation as a matter of course within Korean history and criticized the "fail­ure" of earlier Korean "judicial efforts to protect individual rights' making it clear that this was Japan's primary cause.54

Notably, however, Kuratomi's report also stressed that several differences would have to be maintained between codes that applied to Japanese and those that applied to Koreans. In particular, Kuratomi explained that the law would sustain the practice of flogging Korean prisoners, a decision that had very obvious benefits for the colonizers. Kuratomi assured readers that there was nothing alarming in this discrepancy and announced that the general struc­tural apparatus of the new Korean judicial system meshed seamlessly with Japan's. At the time, of course, it was not at all unusual for colonizing regimes to make useful exemptions in their colonies—such as sustaining the practice of torture—to empower their dominance. Historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki calls these exemptions "giant loopho1es'55 Yoshimi has himself most famously examined the "giant loopholes" that allowed Japan (and other imperialist nations) to exempt their colonial populations from the international laws prohibiting the trafficking of women and children.56 Like flogging, enslaving Koreans as so-called comfort women, for example, was legally provided for in international terms according to Japan's standard civilized procedure. And the imperialists made these provisions openly among themselves.

In 1909, therefore, Korea made legal sense both in Japan and abroad. Korean courts now operated according to the European-defined "three-tiered trial system" (sanshin seid6).57 The composition of the new judiciary is shown in Table 1. Not surprisingly, the proportion of Japanese legal missionaries to that of Korean practitioners of law favored the colonizers. The predictably weighted ratio reveals, however, that Japan intended Korea to make sense with

Table I. Korean Judiciary, 1908

Number of Personnel, by Nationality

Position Japanese Korean Total

Judges 116 66 182

Prosecutors 46 12 58

Chief Clerks 4 0 4

Clerks 153 141 294

Translation Department 4 0 4

Interpreters 18 49 67

Source: Hôritsu Shinbun, 5 August 1909.

116 flapan's Colonization of'I(orea Mission Legislatrice 117

Japanese law but also that Koreans would practice these laws themselves. Under the workings of the new system, a third of the men working as judges were Korean.58

Japan's legal mission is also displayed in the structure of its prisons (see Table 2). In light of the number of wardens listed, the exile penal colony per­haps vanished from the published record. Also of note, the number of Korean jailers exceeded Japanese, and it was the Korean jailers who could be ordered to flog their fellow Koreans. Although Japanese censorship laws severely restricted information, Edward Baker has demonstrated that torturing Korean prisoners in Japanese-run jails not only remained a practice throughout the colonial period, but became, as he archly phrased it, a "policy objective.

'59

According to Baker, "Flogging was an extremely cruel form of punishment. Victims suffered as many as ninety strokes on the buttocks with a bamboo rod while tied in a prone position. . . . In a number of cases, death resulted. The total number of people flogged between 1913 and 1920 has been estimated to be as high as 600,000. According to official figures (Japanese printed), of the 83,128 people (Korean) subjected to summary judgment proceedings in 1912 and 1913, 38,397 were flogged."60

Compounding Baker's findings, in an emotional attack against Japanese colonial rule written in 1921, Korean immigrant to San Francisco Henry Chung argued that the Japanese continually justified the use of flogging "by claiming it was an 'old Korean custom."61 With such a healthy ratio of Kore­ans working in the jails, a Japanese warden would always have had a Korean

Table 2. Korean Prisons, 1908

Number of Personnel, by Nationality

Position Japanese Korean Total

Wardens 8 0 8

Head Jailers 31 8 39

Interpreters 0 8 8

Prison Doctors 3 0 3

Part-time Doctors 5 0 5

Part-time Priests 1 0 1

Part-time Pharmacists 1 0 1

Jailers 151 160 311

Superintendents, Women's Jail 2 0 2

Part-time Superintendent, Women's Jail 1 0 1

Source: Höritsu Shinbun, 5 August 1909.

jailer available to flog a Korean inmate, ingraining the claim that flogging was an "old Korean custom" as demonstrable fact and memory. It is worth men­tioning also that those who maintain an elitist reverence for Ito Hirobumi, subscribing to notions of his benevolent hand (i.e., that ItO would never have annexed Korea), overlook the fact that he authorized torture in the Korean penal codes under his rule, and that such legacies endured throughout the colonial period and arguably beyond.

At the time, readers of such reports in Japan would not have worried about themselves in reference to the practice of flogging because Japan had not yet officially annexed Korea, so Japanese and foreign foreigners continued to be Judged outside the new laws in Korea. However, an editorialist for the Höritsu Shinbun suggested that the time had come that "if [Japan] took the initiative and repealed [extraterritorial] rights the United States and the others would not be able to countermand?'62 The author of this article summed up the pride of his profession when he defined the success of Japan's mission legisla-trice in Korea as a process of "making them assimilate to us" (waga ni dOka seshimuru no michi).63 The belief that extraterritoriality should and could be abandoned in Korea even before the annexation took place expressed a gen­eral opinion that Japan's Korea was legitimate in international terms.

LEGALITY ON TRIAL

It is useful to jump ahead here and consider international response to Japan's first decade of colonial control in Korea. Only in the wake of the March 1, 1919 Independence Movement did the world once again pay measurable attention to Korea as it had in 1907. In response to the Japanese colonial regime's very violent response to the Independence Movement, Canadian journalist Fred­erick McKenzie criticized Japan's rule there:

Between the annexation in 1910 and the uprising of the people in 1919, much material progress was made.... And yet this period of the Japa­nese administration in Korea ranks among the greatest failures of his­tory, a failure greater than that of Russia in Finland or Poland or Aus­tria-Hungary in Bosnia. . . . Good administration is impossible without the part of sympathy on the part of the administrators; with a blind and foolish contempt, it is impossible. They started out to assimilate the Koreans, to destroy their national ideals, to root out their ancient ways, to make them over again as Japanese, but Japanese of an inferior brand, subject to disabilities from which their overlords were free.64

118 fJapan's Colonization of Rorea Mission Legislatrice 119

Measuring one colonial experience against another is odious because the very nature of comparison renders one experience less than the other. Whether Korea's experience was worse than that of the Hawaiians or Chechens or Algerians is not the point, but it is important to draw attention to this first decade of Japanese colonial rule—especially its first few years, 1910-1914--­because it appears to have been an exceptionally brutal period.65

The international condemnation of the severity of Japan's 1919 actions in Korea greatly embarrassed Taisho-era (1912-1926) politicians and diplomats who were, at the time, testing their international muscle by clamoring for inclusion of a racial-equality clause into the League of Nations charter. Although Japanese officials in Tokyo almost assuredly did not read the Cana­dian journalist's account, some might have agreed with his description, at least in part. Following a series of Japan's crackdowns on the Korean protesters, Prime Minister Hara Kei (Takashi) altered the formal structure of the Japa­nese colonial regime in Korea for the first time since the 1905 protectorate. In August 1919, Hara changed the provision that the Japanese ruler of Korea was answerable only to the Japanese emperor, making him more responsible to Parliament; he ordered the colonial governor, Hasegawa Yoshimichi, back to Japan; and he proclaimed a revised set of laws. Hara's cabinet in Tokyo had succeeded the cabinet of former Korean Governor General Terauchi Masatake the previous autumn. The new, self-avowed "liberal" prime minister sensed that the prevailing method of rule in Korea contradicted both the post—World War I international mood and the particular style of governance—the "TaishO democracy"—he advocated in the empire's mainland. Despite a new clause allowing nonmilitary persons to serve as governors general, however, Hara chose former Naval Minister SaitO Makoto to launch a new era of colonial rule in Korea, an era of "cultural rule" (bunka seiji).66

After the mass uprisings throughout Korea, it became commonplace in Japan to condemn the excesses of Governors General Terauchi's and Hase-gawa's reigns (1910-1916 and 1916-1919, respectively). It was widely held that their iron fists and "military rule" (budan seiji) had fomented angry mass rebellion against Japan, the March First Movement. Before the outburst, how­ever, even Japanese journalists of McKenzie's ilk, such as Yoshino Sakuzö, only rarely criticized Japan's rule of Korea. After the March First Movement, Yoshino freely condemned the policies that the "former Government General" had pursued. Following the changes, Yoshino hopefully proclaimed, "The new Government General has been placed under the command of the Prime Min­ ister, which is the single biggest improvement for everything connected with the rule of Korea167

In 1905, ItO Hirobumi, who viewed political parties as methods of social control rather than conduits of democratic discussion, established the provi­sion that the Resident General of Korea would be answerable only to the Japa­nese emperor. Almost fifteen years later, Yoshino SakuzO, democratic advo­cate of the party process, espoused the shift in the rules for governing colonial Korea as the best of all possible changes. The approach each man advocated, however, arguably had more to do with what each saw as detrimental to Japan's domestic politics and was not specifically related to Korea. Opinion in a variety of Japanese newspapers and on the floor of Parliament held that it was not Japan's fault that circumstances had become so extreme in Korea as to cause Koreans to "riot'68 The fault lay with extreme individuals. Now that Japanese law prevented the new Governor General from running his own country within the Japanese empire, all would be for the best.69

I mention this 1919 moment because critics found it easy to lambaste a decade of horrendous violence after the 1919 outburst. Earlier, around 1910, when provisions legitimating the random terror that ensued were put into motion, even the Powers judged Japan's rule of Korea lawful and consented to Japan's desire to end extraterritorial privileges there. This process is eerily sim­ilar to the contemporary CIA's expression, "blowback' which Chalmers John­son has effectively co-opted for the title of his recent book.70 "[B]lowback" Johnson writes, "refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily presses report as the malign acts of 'terrorists' or 'drug lords' or 'rogue states' or 'illegal arms mer­chants' often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations." In 1910, without official exception, the international arena applauded Japan for taking up what it perceived—and with all the racist implications intended for how it was perceived—as the "yellow man's burden' in a whitish sort of way. Along with renaming the country (Kankoku became Chosen in the kanji world but usefully remained "Korea" in other international documents), the Japa­nese renamed their presence there to the elevated stature of Governor Gen­eral (Sotokufu). In international terms, a "Governor Generalship" (extant in India, Algeria, and the Philippines at the time, for example) declared full col­onization. On 1 September 1910, Terauchi sponsored elaborate ceremonies in Seoul for "de-emperoring" Sunjong and remaking him into a king. Although the Ministry of Finance in Tokyo continued to reckon Japanese trade with and

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investment in Korea as "foreign' the Governor General changed the Korean calendar to accord with Japanese imperial reign-years. On 1 January 1912, Japan even aligned Korea to its time zone, where it remains today.

After August 1910, Japanese and Koreans were theoretically ruled by the same laws in Korea—with useful "giant loopholes," of course—but in order for Japan to be recognized as the legal ruler of Korea, Japan needed to incor­porate the other foreigners there into their terms of law.7' In the early years of the annexation, the Japanese press and popular literature often referred to Koreans as "cousins" and "half-siblings" (lit., children of a different womb). The Japanese in Korea remained "Japanese" or "mainlanders' Japanese were not "foreigners' but foreign foreigners still were.

On 29 August 1910, a week after Terauchi Masatake and Yi Wanyong sealed the Treaty of Annexation between Japan and Korea, the Japanese government issued a full explanation of the treaty's provisions.72 The physical space of the peninsula was now a part of Japan, and any agreements that Korea had made with the Powers were "invalid" (mukO). Moreover, "all foreigners residing in Korea [were now] subject to Japanese jurisdiction." Although the Koreans were not redefined as "Japanese legally the Japanese were no longer "foreign' The American ambassador to Japan, Thomas J. O'Brien, requested a more detailed explanation concerning the meaning of the note generated by the 29 August meeting. On 6 October 1910, Foreign Minister Komura JutarO wrote the ambassador a lengthy response, emphasizing that "the modern judiciary sys­tem of Japan has been put into actual operation in Korea to the extent that in all cases in which foreigners are interested as plaintiffs, defendants, or accused, the organization of the competent Courts and the qualifications of the sitting Judges, are essentially the same as in Japan Proper?'73 At this, no foreign Power formally approved of Japan's assertion of legal control over foreign subjects or citizens, but none issued any protest.

The ultimate decision to recognize Japanese law as legal in Korea was tightly interwoven with international perceptions of criminal due process and the eradication of the practice of torture, true to Boissonade's ultimatum in the 1870s. The so-called conspiracy to assassinate Governor General Terau-chi—known in Korean history as the "105 Persons Incident"—forced the question of extraterritoriality onto center and world stage.

In the autumn of 1911, the Governor General began an all-out effort to "round up the usual suspects?' investigating an alleged (or wholly fabricated) attempt to kill him the previous December. At the time, Terauchi was on tour of the northern area of Korea to display himself as the new ruler of Korea.

In the wake of ItO Hirobumi's much-publicized assassination in Harbin by Korean nationalist An Chunggun in October 1909, it was not a difficult leap to describe the country as full of anti-Japanese conspirators and spies. In 1909, however, photographers caught An on film with his smoking revolver. Two years later the only weapon ever found in relation to Terauchi's supposed near-death experience was a two-inch-long penknife in a ten-year-old's backpack. Hundreds of Koreans were imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases beaten to death, yet the whole affair would probably have remained unnoticed—as sim­ilar events most likely did—if Terauchi's investigation had not implicated a number of American Presbyterian missionaries. The "foreign foreignness"—and specifically, the white foreignness—of some of the suspects exploded the affair into an international incident.74

Quite a few of those arrested were Korean Christian converts and ministers working in Christian missionary schools in the northern part of the country, viewed uneasily by the Japanese regime as potential obstacles to their rule. Between September 1911 and the early winter of 1912, Terauchi's police exam­ined several hundred Koreans, ranging from randomly selected schoolboys and local thugs to Yun Ch'iho (1865-1946)—the vice-president of the YMCA in Seoul, a graduate of Vanderbilt University, and a Nitobe InazO—like inter­nationalist. Eventually the police arrested and imprisoned more than a hun­dred Korean men. At least four died in prison. Japanese colonial police also arrested many non-Christians, however. They were men who had at some time or in some way criticized Japanese rule of Korea. Notable "conspirators" of this type included Yang Git'ak (1871-1938), publisher of the Korean Daily Mail (TaeHan Maeil Sinbo); Chang Ungchin, publisher of the nationalist jour­nal Taegük hakpo (Taegük is the name for the Korean flag); Cha Isök (1881­1945)) a leader of the progressive New People's Movement (Sinminhwae); An Taeguk, a member of a self-strengthening agronomy group; and, perhaps most notably, Major Yu Dongyol. Yu actively protested the Japanese colonial regime and was repeatedly thrown in jail throughout the colonial era for his criticisms of Japanese imperialism. Yu vanished to what is now North Korea early in the Korean War, and though it is likely that he joined with Kim Ii Sung after hav­ing become disgusted with Syngman Rhee, much South Korean historiogra­phy laments his martyrdom as a "6-25 abductee?' a person "stolen" north by the communists.75

Reports of the so-called conspiracy emerged murkily. It is important to note at the outset that, as the supposed plot against Terauchi became public, the American consul in Seoul, George Skidmore—an American ambassador

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who served in Tokyo—made it clear that the United States had already begun to acquiesce to complete Japanese control of Korea. From the moment the affair began to unfold, Skidmore dissociated the U.S. government from offi­cial obligation. Japanese and foreign reporters at the Japan Weekly Chronicle in Kobe learned that the Japanese colonial regime in Korea had interrogated several American Presbyterian missionaries as "accomplices to the conspir­acy." The Chronicle's editor, Robert Young, noticed in an article in the Osaka Mainichi that a missionary named George McCune had been arrested and he surmised:

[I]t is evident that the United States Government will have to make a protest against the arrest of an American citizen or in default recognize the abolition of extra-territoriality. This would mean Japan was justi­fied in abolishing extra-territoriality without prior consultation with the Governments which exercised such rights in Korea. . . . At the time the first arrests were made the American Government had not recog­nized the abolition of extra-territoriality by the Japanese Government. Since then it has been reported that the annexation and its concomitants have been recognized by the United States Government, though no for­mal announcement has yet to be published to this effect.76

The United States consul "in default" recognized Japan's claims, in part by preventing the Americans from claiming extraterritorial privileges.

Skidmore also made it clear that the official American position was that the Government General of Korea acted in accordance with the law. Several entries in Governor General Terauchi's journal at the time reinforce the idea that the U.S. representative in Seoul wanted the missionaries to resolve the matter without official intervention. Terauchi kept a sparse diary, and he briefly mentioned conferring with the American consul in October1911.77 In early 1912, he noted meeting with "foreign" missionaries without any official representation, indicating that the U.S. government's preferred method was at work. Several weeks later, he wrote that he "promised to meet with foreign missionaries' which he did by sending them a letter guaranteeing the legality of the investigation:78

Since the introduction of the new regime, the old procedure has been done away with, the persons under examination are now treated in the modern way. . . . If you take into consideration the hours required of each person for careful examination, especially for interpretation, you

will easily understand that the process is not at all unusual. Meanwhile, I may assure you that the authorities concerned under my provision would faithfully perform their duties entrusted to them by law, so that justice may be done to everybody. You may rest assured therefore that if anyone is punished, it is only after he has been proven guilty of a crime by a fair trial.79

Though he never manifested a proclivity for diplomatic euphemisms or flour­ishes, Terauchi knew that the missionaries did not represent U.S. policy, but he did elaborate on the legal means with which his regime was proceeding.

Terauchi's police were, however, not as polite to the missionaries as Ter-auchi was, and they ransacked the missionaries' houses. On 15 January 1912, local police escorted the Chief Prosecutors from Seoul and Pyongyang to George McCune's house outside of Pyongyang. The Governor General's Pri­vate Secretary (and future Governor General of Taiwan), General Akashi MotojirO, accompanied the entourage and ordered the police to rummage through McCune's possessions.80 The following day, investigators began dig­ging up their yards, and the missionaries again appealed to Skidmore, pro­testing now for the first time as citizens: "We feel that you are responsible for this searching of houses, and as American citizens our lives are in your hands for anything that may come from imprisonment." 81

The consul responded that in his estimation Terauchi's men had acted legally in their searches because the missionaries lived in the so-called interior of the country, outside extraterritorial protection. And, as far as he knew, the police had acted according to the law in their conduct with the Korean prison­ers because there was no direct evidence to the contrary. Clearly, the United States government did not regard the investigation of a missionary or two—on sedition charges against a foreign regime, nonetheless—worth risking any of its commercial privileges, and it prevented them from seeking legal protec­tion under consular jurisdiction.82 By 1912, the United States had sanctioned Japan's full takeover of Korea, and the American diplomat in colonized Seoul worked not to criticize the colonizing regime but to secure remaining Amer­ican privileges there.

Although Skidmore hoped to resolve the incident quietly and locally, the American missionaries wrote and cabled friends and colleagues at home to tell them of their own and their Korean coworkers' plight. No less than Charles Eliot, Harvard's famous president (and himself once Governor General of Kenya), traveled to Seoul as a concerned observer to witness the trial. Appalled

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by the Japanese judges' and prosecutors' disregard for the Korean defendants and their lawyers, Eliot went to Tokyo to express his dismay to the Japanese government and emperor. In early September, Eliot wrote his friend, Arthur Judson Brown, Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in New York:

After I got to Tokio, and while the preliminary investigation was still going on, I had several conversations with eminent Japanese about the treatment of the accused Christian Koreans. The two points I have endeavored to make were, first, that no American would believe on any Korean evidence that a single American missionary was in the slightest degree concerned with the alleged conspiracy; and, secondly, that the Japanese preliminary police investigation ought to be modified, and particularly, that the counsel for the defense ought always to be present during all stages of the preliminary investigation. Counsel for the defense might or might not take part in the proceeding, but should be invariably present. I represented that the standing of Japan among West­ern nations might be improved by judicious modifications of her prelimi­nary proceedings against alleged criminals.83

Eliot explained the significance of legal due process. Speaking on behalf of the "Western nations" in favor of the Christian Koreans, he made it clear that per­ceptions of Japan as a legal nation critically extended to activity in its empire.

In America during the summer of 1912, as reports of the Seoul district court proceedings reached New York, Brown decided to voice the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Mission's concerns at official levels. He and four other reli­gious leaders went to Washington to meet with the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Chinda Sutemi, President Taft, and Secretary of State Philander Knox. Brown described their position: "We did not go to Washington to ask for the intervention of our Government. The trial of the accused Koreans is still in progress and no proof has been furnished that the treaty rights of our missionaries as American citizens have been denied, although missionary work there has been seriously embarrassed. Officially, therefore, the question at its present stage concerns the dealings of the Japanese Government with its own subjects, and, of course, our Government would not feel that this called for interference through diplomatic channels."84

The sentencing of the 105 "conspirators" in late September, however, pro­pelled the board's leaders to act with more resolve, and they called an emer­gency meeting on 11 October 1912. Brown invited men like Eliot, who had returned to the United States and wanted to share his opinions. The list of guests at the "Confidential Conference on the Situation in Korea' held at a men's club in New York, included powerful and well-connected men whom the United States government would not ignore:

The Honorable Seth Low, LL.D., formerly Mayor of New York and

Chairman of the American Section of the Edinburgh World Confer‑

ence Commission on the Relations of Missions and Governments The Honorable John W. Foster, D.D., LL.D., formerly Secretary of State Charles W. Eliot, LL.D., formerly President of Harvard University Arthur T Hadley, LL.D., President of Yale University

The Reverend Lyman Abbott, D.D., LL.D., Editor of The Outlook

The Honorable James Brown Scott, Advisor on International Law to the United States at The Hague Peace Conference85

Jeremiah W Jenks, LL.D., Professor of Political Economy, New York University

(Admiral Alfred Mahan absent due to illness)86

The group resolved to negotiate directly with the Japanese ambassador, to assert that "the course of the Japanese police and the first trial of the accused Koreans did not do justice to the real spirit and purpose of the Japanese Gov­ernment and people in dealing with their subjects in Korea?'87 The men reg­istered their displeasure over what appeared to all as a lawless trial. They acknowledged, however, that Japan had legally gained control of Korea. Sim­ilar to the American consul who did not want to risk commercial privileges, the religious coalition wanted to guarantee its proselytizing privileges. Despite their challenge to the Japanese colonial regime's desire to police its new terri­tory, the men purposefully implied that, after cordoning off those privileges, the missionaries would work quietly within the prevailing system.

The following month, Arthur Brown published a strongly worded essay concerning the Terauchi affair, ironically coining what would become the Japanese historiographical appellation of the event, the "Korean Conspiracy Case?'88 Similar to Boissonade in his Commentaire and ItO Hirobumi's scribes in their Reports, Brown asserted that he spoke for "the civilized world." In the opening lines, he wrote:

The interest of the civilized world has been aroused by the difficulties that have developed in Korea (Japanese Chosen) and which have cul­minated in the arrest, trial and conviction of a large number of Korean

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Christians on a charge of conspiring to assassinate Count Terauchi, the Governor General. The circumstances raise some grave questions in which western peoples are deeply concerned.89

Sanctimoniously inserting a specific moral gravity to the situation, Brown continued:

It is true that from the viewpoint of international law and diplomatic intercourse, these questions primarily relate to Japan's treatment of her own subjects; but it is also true that it maybe said of nations, as of indi­viduals, that "none of us liveth to himself." Mankind has passed the stage where it is indifferent to what any Government does to a subject race.9°

Regardless of the fact that international law presumed its own legality because its terms were practiced under God, in this activist missionary's estimation, the voice of the apostle Paul overruled this particular mundane theory. Brown ended up defining Japan as a full practitioner of international terms, terms he considered the lesser standard than Christian law.

Like Boissonade, Brown prescribed a method by which Japan could escape international denigration. Quoting and commenting on Eliot's letter, Brown took up the suggestion that "judicious modifications of [Japan's] preliminary proceedings against alleged criminals" would raise "the standing of Japan among Western nations?' Brown elaborated, "Japan wishes to be considered one of the most advanced nations of the world, and if it expects to be regarded as such, it should so amend its criminal law that it can withstand criticism that is based not on a technical difference of method but on that essential justice which mankind has come to demand even from the lowest of men, "91 In effect, the American secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions chal­lenged the Japanese Governor General of Korea to display "essential justice" to "the civilized world" to secure Japan's status as one among the "most advanced nations of the world?'

Before the 1910 annexation, Ito's legal scions laid the foundations for Japan's display of its "pure and competent" rule of Korea. Many in Japan and abroad had discerned a mishandling of justice at the first trial in the Seoul District Court, in 1912, but the display of justice performed at the subsequent appeals trials in Seoul and Taegu legitimated Japan's rule of Korea. Moreover, observers came away from the trials convinced that the Japanese regime had stopped the practice of torture—despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The "civilized world" judged Japan's rule of Korea legal.

Japanese judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers presented Japan's lawful rule of Korea to courtrooms full of spectators at the appeals proceedings. Only a few American missionaries had observed the first trial in 1912, but interest in the appeals hearings brought crowds of spectators to the new, brightly lit witness gallery. Defense lawyers had complained in the first trial about lack of Korean translation, but for the appeals proceedings the Governor General's office supplied ample interpretation of the proceedings. What observers judged, however, was not the good English that the interpreters could provide, but how the legal terminology they uttered accorded to civilized practice. Similar to ItO Hirobumi's negotiations of the Treaty of Tianjin in English, in 1885, the significance of the legal terminology at the hearings surpassed the particular language in which it was spoken. In the eyes and ears of both the Japanese defense lawyers and the foreign spectators in the courtroom gallery, the reflexively understood proceedings proclaimed the legitimate universality of Japan's rule in Korea.

The first appeals proceedings lasted until March 1913, when the court upheld lengthy sentences for six of the accused but acquitted the remaining ninety-nine. Even Robert Young's Japan Weekly Chronicle, which had so strongly condemned the Japanese Governor General and American complic­ity the year before, praised the results: "We are satisfied to congratulate the Seoul Court of Appeal on having wiped away a very large blot which threat­ened to discredit the Japanese judicial administration in the eyes of a world for a generation?'92

Shortly thereafter, the Powers erased extraterritorial privileges they had not yet ceded. On 21 April 1913, diplomats from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Belgium formally abolished extraterritoriality in Korea and reverted all their official property to the Japanese Governor Gen-eral.93 During the appeals trial, Japan demonstrated justice to the world. Both the verdict and the Powers' assessment combined openly to declare Japan the legitimate ruler of Korea.

Oddly, however, the relationship between the external perception of inter­nal justice in Japan's Korea and the enduring practice of torture there surfaced acutely during these appeals proceedings.94 In view of international outrage at even the suggestion of torture, one might assume that witness testimony would have cautioned the Powers in their praise of Japan's Korea. On the con‑

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trary, the defense based its appeal on the violent manner in which Terauchi's police had obtained the prosecution's evidence. It sought to overturn all 105 sentences, because lawyers argued that the convicted men made their confes­sions under torture. Judges Suzuki Kumisaburo, Maruyama EtarO, and Hara Masakane opened the appeals proceedings on the first day by calling Yuri Ch'iho before the bench. In response to their interrogation, Yun stated simply, in fluent Japanese, that he lied to police because he was "tortured" (g6mon).95 The next "conspirator," Kim Ilchom, proclaimed through an interpreter that he told wild lies during the initial trial because torture had caused him to be "delirious." 96

By the second day of the appeals trial (27 November 1912), the defense team's strategy was clear. When the judges questioned Yi Yonghwa, he graph­ically detailed how police procured their evidence. A reporter from the Japan Weekly Chronicle captured the scene: "Yi Yong-wha was called. He is a stout, good-looking man with a moustache. He is a great orator and is said to be more skillful in his own defence than any lawyer. He spoke so eagerly as to enlist the sympathy even of those who did not understand Korean." 97

Countering the charges against him, Yi asserted that his jailers tortured him at length. They beat him, they starved him for days, they strung him up by his fingers, they burned him, and they injected unknown fluids into his body.98 Yi's testimony set the stage for subsequent defendants to detail their experi­ences, which they did throughout the proceedings' fifty-one hearings. Unlike the first trial the previous summer, where defense lawyers often met the accused the moment they were expected to provide defense for them, at the appeals trials the prisoners' attorneys met with the defendants beforehand to discuss what they would say. Moreover, the defense fostered an environment in the courtroom that encouraged the accused to report, for example, having been "hung from a tree with a sword thrust at neckpoint" and to describe death threats issued to family members.99 One prisoner, Yi Pyöngje, gave a particularly vivid account. He described how Terauchi's police had suspended him by his thumbs, which were tied together behind his back. After further beatings and burnings with cigarettes, the police covered Yi's face with paper, poured freezing water over him, and left him to hang outdoors, occasionally beating his hips with a block of wood .'°°

The prisoners' testimony shocked trial spectators and newspaper readers, Japanese and foreign alike. And yet as they presided over a trial that displayed the "essential justice" of the colonial legal system in Korea to the "civilized world," the Japanese never mentioned that Terauchi's police actually were within the bounds of the existing law, because the Koreans whom they tor­tured were legally defined as "native offenders." The previous March, the Governor General's office had officially upheld certain torture practices in the penal codes for use against Koreans. Anyone interested could read the ration­ale in English in the colonial regime's annual report: "Flogging being a form of punishment practised in Korea for ages past, it seemed likely more effective as a measure of punishment for trifling offences than short imprisonment or small fines, provided it was done in a proper manner. Consequently it was decided to retain it, but only for application to native offenders. . . . The method of infliction was also improved so that, by observing greater human­ity, unnecessary pain in carrying out a flogging could be avoided as far as pos-sible"°1 Despite the far-reaching implications of the Japanese government's action, the vast number of overturned convictions (ninety-nine) satisfied the trial's international observers that their journeys had been worth the effort: "pure and competent" justice had come to Korea.

The events bringing the so-called conspiracy proceedings to light—cou-pled with the missionaries' general satisfaction that the Japanese colonial regime legitimately ruled Korea—underscore the partiality of external percep­tions of a particular regime's internal execution of justice. Governor General Terauchi legally encoded torture for Koreans. In an open courtroom, Korean prisoners described the horrors they endured, horrors that bespoke the deeply held beliefs of many Japanese colonizers: Koreans were refuse and merely the objects of experimentation. In spite of the brutality of Japanese rule, the Pow­ers recognized the legality of Japan's display and openly abrogated their priv­ileges of consular jurisdiction a month after the first appeals trial ended. For the legal nations of the world, Japan's rule of Korea was fully legal in interna­tional terms.