Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power (Peoples of Hawai'i, the Pacific, & Asia)
byDudden, Alexis
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Description
"From its creation in the early twentieth-century, policymakers used the discourse of international law to legitimate Japan's empire. Although the Japanese state aggrandizers' reliance on this discourse did not create the imperial nation Japan would become, their fluent use of its terms inscribed Japan's claims as legal practice within Japan and abroad.
Focusing on Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910, Alexis Dudden gives long-needed attention to the intellectual history of the empire and
brings to light presumptions of the twentieth century's so-called international system by describing its most powerful - and most often overlooked - member's engagement with that system."
- "This landmark study greatly enhances our understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of Japan's imperial aspirations.
- Carefully researched and cogently argued, it makes clear that, even before Japan annexed Korea, it had embarked on a legal and often legislating mission to make its colonization legitimate in the eyes of the world.
- In so doing, Tokyo's early twentieth-century policy makers confirmed Japan's place in the international history of empire."
--BOOK JACKET.
Contents
1. Illegal Korea --
2. International terms of engagement --
3. The vocabulary of power --
4. Voices of dissent --
5. Mission legislatrice --
Coda : a knowledgeable empire.
Publisher
Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press
Format
x, 215 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
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Review
Excellent, Korean Quarterly
A skillful narrative, Japan Times
Students of Japan’s history, domestic politics, and international relations will find this text extremely valuable, as will readers of theorists such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Spivak.... Essential. All levels/libraries., CHOICE
A welcome and important addition ... It casts the entire imperialist enterprise―with Japan as an integral part of that enterprise―in a fresh light, American Historical Review
Review
Japan’s Colonization of Korea makes a powerful case that every step Japan took to erase Korea’s sovereignty was ‘legal’ in the prevailing terms of international conduct at the start of the twentieth century―and that taking Korea as a protectorate was a strategic step in Japan’s own efforts to achieve diplomatic parity with the Great Powers of the West. Alexis Dudden deftly dissects colonial rhetoric and practice from Sapporo to Seoul, interweaving biographical with textual analysis and showing a keen attentiveness throughout to Korean as well as Japanese voices. Drawing on legal history, colonial studies, and translation theory, the book is impressive in both heft and range. A compelling addition to the growing field of comparative imperial history. -- Karen Wigen, Stanford University
David Quigley
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, yet not an easy, enjoyable readReviewed in the United States on April 25, 2006
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Dr. Dudden presents her argument that Japan mastered, and sometimes misused, western terms for international law. Using their mastery, they made their annexation of Korea "legal" by international terms. In doing so, Japan won the support of much of the west (excluding Russia) and situated itself as a legal colonizer of Korea.
Although the topic is interesting, the book is not one that is easily read. It is often out of chronological order and sometimes goes off on tangents that take the reader's attention away from the topic at hand. Dr. Dudden presents her points using words that I am convinced she searched through a thesaurus for, as the terms are often very obscure. Although she obviously knows the subject extremely well, it sometimes seemed as if she was going around in circles when explaining an idea.
I wish she would have gone more into Japan's actions when in Korea. The book is mainly about the "discourse" used in international law and how Japan came around in mastering these terms and even translating them into their own language. It is at times very boring to read, but Dr. Dudden does make her points clearly in each chapter.
I would suggest this book for anyone interested in Japanese and/or Korean history as it shows how a country can legally be taken control of just by the usage of language. It is a concept foreign to most people today, but was an important historical moment for Japan when they made the annexation of Korea legal.
11 people found this helpful
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Nerdus Maximus
5.0 out of 5 stars An angle at this piece of history most historians and observers ignoreReviewed in the United States on September 25, 2012
Format: Paperback
Alexis Dudden tackles the Japanese annexation of Korea from the perspective of the legal framework which Japan used to take Korea into its sphere. She explains and details how Japan, far earlier and ahead of both China and Korea, mastered the western empires' usage and definition of international law to legitimize and defend their own takeover of other countries and adopted the westerners' own "game" to become an international power player, and hence, avoid the fates of those nations colonized by the west.
A short, yet rich book, filled with interesting and relevant facts. Merits at least two readings.
4 people found this helpful
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일본의 한국식민지화
출판사 제공 책소개
도서출판 늘품플러스의 신간 『일본의 한국식민지화: 담론과 권력』은 현대 일본을 연구하는 학자들이 간과하는 문제를 파고든다. 20세기로 접어들어 일본 지도자들이 일본을 새롭게 정의하면서 부상했던 자국 내에서의 담론이 바로 그것이다. 그런 면에서 이 책은 권력과 어법이 어떻게 융합되는지를 보여줌으로써 권력 다툼에서는 군사력만이 진정으로 힘을 발휘한다는 주장을 반박하고 있다.
일본 메이지 시대에 일어난 가장 큰 변혁은 국제법을 일본어로 해석하고 그 조항들을 실천했다는 것이다. 그럼으로써 일본은 미국, 유럽 열강들과 대화하는 새로운 방식을 터득했고, 그간 아시아에서 법적 개념을 규정하는 특권을 누려왔던 중국을 제치고 힘의 질서를 재편할 수 있었다. 그리고 세계를 휩쓴 제국주의 역사의 물결에서 일본의 제국설립에 합법성을 부여할 수 있게 된다. 책은 그러한 일본의 어법이 어떻게 형성되고 전파되는지를 추적한다.
또 일본이 한국을 침략하면서 제시한 담론적인 측면을 분석한다. 특히 당시 국제법적 측면들에 주의를 기울인다. 일본은 1910년에 가서야 공식적으로 ‘한국 병합’을 선언했지만 그 이전부터 한국에 대한 일본의 정책을 합법화하기 위한 법적 기초 마련에 착수했다. 일본이 팽창주의 국가로서 합법성을 인정받으려면 자국의 정책을 국제법에 따라 규정할 필요가 있었고 식민 통치에서는 무엇보다도 그 행위에 합법성을 부여하는 일이 중요했기 때문이다.
한일합병의 합법성 여부에 대한 논쟁은 오늘날에도 끊이지 않고 있다. 우리는 당시에 무엇이 합법적이었는지를 살펴봄으로써 무엇이 합법적인 관행으로 여겨졌는지를 이해할 필요가 있다. 권력이 어법과 함께 어떻게 작동하는지에 대한 보다 깊은 이해가 필요한 대목이다.
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[마이리뷰] 일본의 한국식민지화
미국 코네티컷 대학의 역사학과 교수이자, 특히 일본제국주의 시대와 관련된 동북아 역사에 대한 관심을 기울여 온 알렉시스 더든은 우리에게도 낯설지 않은 학자입니다. 지난 2015년, 일본 종군 위안부 문제와 관련하여 미국 내 역사학자 성명을 이끈 공로로 만해평화상을 받은 이력이 있는데요. 당시에 일본 아베 정권에 대한 비판과 함께 세계에 큰 반향을 일으킨 바가 있습니다. 그녀의 ‘일본의 한국식민지화’라는 이 글 또한 그러한 연장선상에 있는 연구라고 생각되는데요. 다만 이 책에 대한 서지 정보가 확실히 잡히지 않아 구글링을 하게 되었는데, 출판 연도가 2004년으로 나와 있지만 정보가 정확한지는 약간 불명확합니다. 이 점 양해 말씀 드립니다. 국내에는 출판사인 늘품플러스가 2016년 번역 출판하였습니다.
알렉시스 더든이 이 책에서 밝히고자 하는 점은 이렇습니다. 1차대전 발발 이전의 제국주의 시대에서 야만국은 마땅히 문명국의 통치를 받아야 한다는 ‘계몽적 통치’에 대한 해석과 이를 바탕으로 일본이 근대화 된 군사무기로 팽창에 나서지만, 그것보다 “권력 다툼에서 군사력만이 진정한 힘을 발휘한다”는 취지의 주장을 넘어서 일본이 이 시기의 국제법과 국제조약 및 외교용어들을 조선과 청나라에 능수능란하게 교묘한 술수로 사용하며 팽창주의의 합법성을 얻으려고 한 이면을 파헤치고자 쓴 글이라 할 수 있습니다. 조금 장황하지만 결국 요점은 “이른바 문명 국가들은 야만적인 국가들을 합법적으로 정복하고 통치할 수 있다”는 당시 식민지 제국주의 국가들의 이론적 잣대인 계몽적 통치와 이것을 적극적으로 수용하여 조선을 병탄하고, 당시의 조선을 야만국으로 규정한 일본의 외교적 술수에 대한 분석이 주된 요점입니다.
일본은 1853년 미국 매튜 페리 제독의 흑선에 의해 소위 불평등 개항을 강제로 맞게 됩니다. 당시의 일본 식자들은 이러한 굴욕적인 불평등 조약이 후에 일본이 기준에 맞는 힘을 되찾게 될 때 극복할 수 있다고 여겼지만, 그것보다도 도쿠가와 막부가 붕괴하고 일왕이 전면에 등장하는 정치적 격변의 시기와 부분적 근대화를 통한 국력을 신장한 경험으로 자신들의 제국주의 시대를 열게 되는데요. 물론 저는 이 점을 옹호하고자 저런 수사를 붙인 것은 아닙니다. 저 역시 알렉시스 더든의 일본 제국주의에 대한 짤막한 평가인 “일본제국주의 역사 속에는 한국, 중국, 그 밖의 도처에서 강제로 이주당해 공장과 군막사에서 노동자로, 성노예로 착취당한 수백만명의 사람들이 존재한다는 사실도 포함되어야 한다”는 가슴 복잡한 이 문장에 전적으로 동의합니다. 지금도 일본의 대다수의 지식인들과 무지한 시민들은 2차대전 이전의 아시아에 대한 침략행위가 일본제국이 종말을 고함으로써 끝났다고 동시에 그 책임이 소멸했으며, “일본의 팽창주의 산물인 제국이 붕괴된 후 반세기가 지난 현재, 사람들은 두 부류로 나뉘어 서로 다른 방법을 이용해 마치 입을 맞춘 듯 서로 도와가며 역사적 과오를 정화하하려고 하고 있다”고 저자 역시 비판하고 있습니다.
우선 이 글의 시작은 1907년 네덜란드 헤이그에서 열린 만국 평화 회의의 진화론적 사회학에 입각해 유럽 제국주의의에 의한 식민통치를 번영이라 여기고 이 왜곡된 평화가 영원히 지속될 것이라고 여기고 있던 당시의 시대상이 저자인 더든의 글로 잘 나타나 있습니다. 일찍이 E. H. 카는 1차대전 이전의 이러한 이상주의적이고 낭만주의적인 평화 분위기가 끔찍한 대전의 원인이었다고 여기는 것에 한편으로 동의가 될 만큼 이들은 자신들을 문명국이라 자처하면서 번영의 시대라고 여기고 있었죠. 가까스로 신흥국의 반열에 들어선 일본은 자신들도 역시 열강의 틈바구니 안에 들어가길 원했습니다. 여기에는 제레미 벤담이 고안한 international 인터내셔널, 국제 및 국제주의와 국제법과 관련한 당시 동아시아에는 생소했던 이들과 관련된 연구를 일본인들이 끊임없이 지속해 왔고 이것이 단순한 상업행위를 통한 교역을 야만과 비야만을 구분하는데 그치지 않고 도로 조선과 청나라를 야만으로 규정하는 데 교묘히 쓰였다는 점에서 통렬한 감정이 들 수 밖에 없었습니다. 또한 이 시기의 정한론과 조선 병합의 목적을 추구한 일본의 이토 히로부미가 “일본이 러시아와의 전쟁에 말려들어간 이유도 이와 같이 인도주의적 원칙을 수호하기 위해서”라는 주장이 얼마나 교묘한 언술에 지나지 않는지 알 수 있습니다. 마찬가지로 자기들 손으로 더러운 일을 하지 않기 위해 이완용과 송병준 같은 부역자를 이용해 추잡한 짓을 벌인 일은 일본인들이 과연 인도주의와 정의를 입에 담을 수 있는지 생각해 볼 문제입니다.
저는 이 미국의 여류 역사학자의 이 연구에서 특히, 일본이 당시 조선을 의사-독립국으로 여긴 점이 관심을 끌었는데요. 조선이 법적으로 청나라 속국이었던 것은 명백했지만 독립국으로서 조선 국왕이 자주권으로 통치하고 있었으나 이 중국 대륙에 의한 전통적인 동아시아 정치적 관계를 잘 알고 자신들도 그러한 범주안에 속해 있던 일본이 그것을 모른척하면서 조선을 독립과 자주권을 주장할 수 없는 국가로 술책을 부린 것은 1870년대 초 일본에서 불던 정한론으로는 전부 설명할 수 없는 노골적인 야욕이라고 해야할까요. 저자도 분명 인정하는 부분이지만 강화도 조약으로 시작해 1910년 말장난에 불과한 대한제국 병탄을 한일합방으로 포장하기까지 면밀한 정치외교적 과정을 꼼꼼히 갖춰나가면서 당시 열강국들로부터 승인받으며 대한제국 편입을 마무리 한 것입니다. 자신들의 욕심으로 태평양 전쟁이 발발하면서 1943년 미드웨이 해전 패배 후 미국과의 단독 강화 시도를 통해 만주와 대만, 한반도의 지배 만이라도 유지하려고 했던 일본제국의 의도가 무엇인지는 더 말할 필요가 없겠죠.
바로 3장이 일본의 동아시아 침탈 과정에서 일본인들이 국제법과 국제용어 해석과 이론 습득에 나선 이유이기도 합니다. 여기에는 조선 사법권 박탈과 관련된 프랑스인 구스타브 봐소나드의 일화가 쓰여져 있는데요. 저자인 더든이 이런 사례까지 조사한 것은 한국 학자들보다 더 치밀한 연구로 볼 수 있습니다. 사실 한국의 국사학계가 당시 메이지 유신에 대한 천편일률적 해석과 일본의 근대에 대한 지속적인 폄하를 해오고 있는데요. 저는 지금이라도 우리 학계가 이것에 대한 면밀한 연구를 하는 것이 중요하다고 생각합니다. 국내에 많은 학자들은 1905년 태프트-가쓰라 밀약과 1902년 이후 영일동맹이 갱신되면서 인도와 대한제국을 맞교환한 영일 양국의 우호조약에만 신경쓴 나머지 이것만을 알파와 오메가로 여기고 있습니다. 마찬가지로 정한론에 대한 연구도 이런 차원에서 다시 조밀하게 살펴볼 필요가 있지 않나 생각해봅니다.
끝으로 오늘날의 일본인들과 일본 정부가 2차대전 종전 이후, 과거의 일본제국과 미군에 의해 민주정치로 개조된 자신들의 현재 정부가 법적으로도 정치적으로도 과거 제국주의의 유산과는 다르다고 선을 긋고는 있지만 전후 체제에 대한 전면적인 수정주의적 입장과 종래의 평화헌법 개정과 관련된 시도에서 많은 아시아 국가들이 우려를 금할 수 밖에 없는 이유가 있을 것입니다. 과거에 대한 사과가 국격의 손상이라고 여기는 이들의 태도에서 앞으로 역사 문제 뿐만 아니라 정치적 문제까지 일본과 관련된 요건들이 어떤 식으로 결말이 날지는 다른 수식어가 필요 없어 보입니다. 많은 아시아 국가들에 대한 이 알맹이가 빠진 협력 운운이 차라리 아예 없었으면 하는 바람을 갖고 있습니다. 이 역사 문제가 과연 해결될 문제일 수 있을까요. 이 질문에는 모두가 답을 짐작하실 겁니다.
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일본의 한국식민지화
출판사 제공 책소개
도서출판 늘품플러스의 신간 『일본의 한국식민지화: 담론과 권력』은 현대 일본을 연구하는 학자들이 간과하는 문제를 파고든다. 20세기로 접어들어 일본 지도자들이 일본을 새롭게 정의하면서 부상했던 자국 내에서의 담론이 바로 그것이다. 그런 면에서 이 책은 권력과 어법이 어떻게 융합되는지를 보여줌으로써 권력 다툼에서는 군사력만이 진정으로 힘을 발휘한다는 주장을 반박하고 있다.
일본 메이지 시대에 일어난 가장 큰 변혁은 국제법을 일본어로 해석하고 그 조항들을 실천했다는 것이다. 그럼으로써 일본은 미국, 유럽 열강들과 대화하는 새로운 방식을 터득했고, 그간 아시아에서 법적 개념을 규정하는 특권을 누려왔던 중국을 제치고 힘의 질서를 재편할 수 있었다. 그리고 세계를 휩쓴 제국주의 역사의 물결에서 일본의 제국설립에 합법성을 부여할 수 있게 된다. 책은 그러한 일본의 어법이 어떻게 형성되고 전파되는지를 추적한다.
또 일본이 한국을 침략하면서 제시한 담론적인 측면을 분석한다. 특히 당시 국제법적 측면들에 주의를 기울인다. 일본은 1910년에 가서야 공식적으로 ‘한국 병합’을 선언했지만 그 이전부터 한국에 대한 일본의 정책을 합법화하기 위한 법적 기초 마련에 착수했다. 일본이 팽창주의 국가로서 합법성을 인정받으려면 자국의 정책을 국제법에 따라 규정할 필요가 있었고 식민 통치에서는 무엇보다도 그 행위에 합법성을 부여하는 일이 중요했기 때문이다.
한일합병의 합법성 여부에 대한 논쟁은 오늘날에도 끊이지 않고 있다. 우리는 당시에 무엇이 합법적이었는지를 살펴봄으로써 무엇이 합법적인 관행으로 여겨졌는지를 이해할 필요가 있다. 권력이 어법과 함께 어떻게 작동하는지에 대한 보다 깊은 이해가 필요한 대목이다.
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[마이리뷰] 일본의 한국식민지화
미국 코네티컷 대학의 역사학과 교수이자, 특히 일본제국주의 시대와 관련된 동북아 역사에 대한 관심을 기울여 온 알렉시스 더든은 우리에게도 낯설지 않은 학자입니다. 지난 2015년, 일본 종군 위안부 문제와 관련하여 미국 내 역사학자 성명을 이끈 공로로 만해평화상을 받은 이력이 있는데요. 당시에 일본 아베 정권에 대한 비판과 함께 세계에 큰 반향을 일으킨 바가 있습니다. 그녀의 ‘일본의 한국식민지화’라는 이 글 또한 그러한 연장선상에 있는 연구라고 생각되는데요. 다만 이 책에 대한 서지 정보가 확실히 잡히지 않아 구글링을 하게 되었는데, 출판 연도가 2004년으로 나와 있지만 정보가 정확한지는 약간 불명확합니다. 이 점 양해 말씀 드립니다. 국내에는 출판사인 늘품플러스가 2016년 번역 출판하였습니다.
알렉시스 더든이 이 책에서 밝히고자 하는 점은 이렇습니다. 1차대전 발발 이전의 제국주의 시대에서 야만국은 마땅히 문명국의 통치를 받아야 한다는 ‘계몽적 통치’에 대한 해석과 이를 바탕으로 일본이 근대화 된 군사무기로 팽창에 나서지만, 그것보다 “권력 다툼에서 군사력만이 진정한 힘을 발휘한다”는 취지의 주장을 넘어서 일본이 이 시기의 국제법과 국제조약 및 외교용어들을 조선과 청나라에 능수능란하게 교묘한 술수로 사용하며 팽창주의의 합법성을 얻으려고 한 이면을 파헤치고자 쓴 글이라 할 수 있습니다. 조금 장황하지만 결국 요점은 “이른바 문명 국가들은 야만적인 국가들을 합법적으로 정복하고 통치할 수 있다”는 당시 식민지 제국주의 국가들의 이론적 잣대인 계몽적 통치와 이것을 적극적으로 수용하여 조선을 병탄하고, 당시의 조선을 야만국으로 규정한 일본의 외교적 술수에 대한 분석이 주된 요점입니다.
일본은 1853년 미국 매튜 페리 제독의 흑선에 의해 소위 불평등 개항을 강제로 맞게 됩니다. 당시의 일본 식자들은 이러한 굴욕적인 불평등 조약이 후에 일본이 기준에 맞는 힘을 되찾게 될 때 극복할 수 있다고 여겼지만, 그것보다도 도쿠가와 막부가 붕괴하고 일왕이 전면에 등장하는 정치적 격변의 시기와 부분적 근대화를 통한 국력을 신장한 경험으로 자신들의 제국주의 시대를 열게 되는데요. 물론 저는 이 점을 옹호하고자 저런 수사를 붙인 것은 아닙니다. 저 역시 알렉시스 더든의 일본 제국주의에 대한 짤막한 평가인 “일본제국주의 역사 속에는 한국, 중국, 그 밖의 도처에서 강제로 이주당해 공장과 군막사에서 노동자로, 성노예로 착취당한 수백만명의 사람들이 존재한다는 사실도 포함되어야 한다”는 가슴 복잡한 이 문장에 전적으로 동의합니다. 지금도 일본의 대다수의 지식인들과 무지한 시민들은 2차대전 이전의 아시아에 대한 침략행위가 일본제국이 종말을 고함으로써 끝났다고 동시에 그 책임이 소멸했으며, “일본의 팽창주의 산물인 제국이 붕괴된 후 반세기가 지난 현재, 사람들은 두 부류로 나뉘어 서로 다른 방법을 이용해 마치 입을 맞춘 듯 서로 도와가며 역사적 과오를 정화하하려고 하고 있다”고 저자 역시 비판하고 있습니다.
우선 이 글의 시작은 1907년 네덜란드 헤이그에서 열린 만국 평화 회의의 진화론적 사회학에 입각해 유럽 제국주의의에 의한 식민통치를 번영이라 여기고 이 왜곡된 평화가 영원히 지속될 것이라고 여기고 있던 당시의 시대상이 저자인 더든의 글로 잘 나타나 있습니다. 일찍이 E. H. 카는 1차대전 이전의 이러한 이상주의적이고 낭만주의적인 평화 분위기가 끔찍한 대전의 원인이었다고 여기는 것에 한편으로 동의가 될 만큼 이들은 자신들을 문명국이라 자처하면서 번영의 시대라고 여기고 있었죠. 가까스로 신흥국의 반열에 들어선 일본은 자신들도 역시 열강의 틈바구니 안에 들어가길 원했습니다. 여기에는 제레미 벤담이 고안한 international 인터내셔널, 국제 및 국제주의와 국제법과 관련한 당시 동아시아에는 생소했던 이들과 관련된 연구를 일본인들이 끊임없이 지속해 왔고 이것이 단순한 상업행위를 통한 교역을 야만과 비야만을 구분하는데 그치지 않고 도로 조선과 청나라를 야만으로 규정하는 데 교묘히 쓰였다는 점에서 통렬한 감정이 들 수 밖에 없었습니다. 또한 이 시기의 정한론과 조선 병합의 목적을 추구한 일본의 이토 히로부미가 “일본이 러시아와의 전쟁에 말려들어간 이유도 이와 같이 인도주의적 원칙을 수호하기 위해서”라는 주장이 얼마나 교묘한 언술에 지나지 않는지 알 수 있습니다. 마찬가지로 자기들 손으로 더러운 일을 하지 않기 위해 이완용과 송병준 같은 부역자를 이용해 추잡한 짓을 벌인 일은 일본인들이 과연 인도주의와 정의를 입에 담을 수 있는지 생각해 볼 문제입니다.
저는 이 미국의 여류 역사학자의 이 연구에서 특히, 일본이 당시 조선을 의사-독립국으로 여긴 점이 관심을 끌었는데요. 조선이 법적으로 청나라 속국이었던 것은 명백했지만 독립국으로서 조선 국왕이 자주권으로 통치하고 있었으나 이 중국 대륙에 의한 전통적인 동아시아 정치적 관계를 잘 알고 자신들도 그러한 범주안에 속해 있던 일본이 그것을 모른척하면서 조선을 독립과 자주권을 주장할 수 없는 국가로 술책을 부린 것은 1870년대 초 일본에서 불던 정한론으로는 전부 설명할 수 없는 노골적인 야욕이라고 해야할까요. 저자도 분명 인정하는 부분이지만 강화도 조약으로 시작해 1910년 말장난에 불과한 대한제국 병탄을 한일합방으로 포장하기까지 면밀한 정치외교적 과정을 꼼꼼히 갖춰나가면서 당시 열강국들로부터 승인받으며 대한제국 편입을 마무리 한 것입니다. 자신들의 욕심으로 태평양 전쟁이 발발하면서 1943년 미드웨이 해전 패배 후 미국과의 단독 강화 시도를 통해 만주와 대만, 한반도의 지배 만이라도 유지하려고 했던 일본제국의 의도가 무엇인지는 더 말할 필요가 없겠죠.
바로 3장이 일본의 동아시아 침탈 과정에서 일본인들이 국제법과 국제용어 해석과 이론 습득에 나선 이유이기도 합니다. 여기에는 조선 사법권 박탈과 관련된 프랑스인 구스타브 봐소나드의 일화가 쓰여져 있는데요. 저자인 더든이 이런 사례까지 조사한 것은 한국 학자들보다 더 치밀한 연구로 볼 수 있습니다. 사실 한국의 국사학계가 당시 메이지 유신에 대한 천편일률적 해석과 일본의 근대에 대한 지속적인 폄하를 해오고 있는데요. 저는 지금이라도 우리 학계가 이것에 대한 면밀한 연구를 하는 것이 중요하다고 생각합니다. 국내에 많은 학자들은 1905년 태프트-가쓰라 밀약과 1902년 이후 영일동맹이 갱신되면서 인도와 대한제국을 맞교환한 영일 양국의 우호조약에만 신경쓴 나머지 이것만을 알파와 오메가로 여기고 있습니다. 마찬가지로 정한론에 대한 연구도 이런 차원에서 다시 조밀하게 살펴볼 필요가 있지 않나 생각해봅니다.
끝으로 오늘날의 일본인들과 일본 정부가 2차대전 종전 이후, 과거의 일본제국과 미군에 의해 민주정치로 개조된 자신들의 현재 정부가 법적으로도 정치적으로도 과거 제국주의의 유산과는 다르다고 선을 긋고는 있지만 전후 체제에 대한 전면적인 수정주의적 입장과 종래의 평화헌법 개정과 관련된 시도에서 많은 아시아 국가들이 우려를 금할 수 밖에 없는 이유가 있을 것입니다. 과거에 대한 사과가 국격의 손상이라고 여기는 이들의 태도에서 앞으로 역사 문제 뿐만 아니라 정치적 문제까지 일본과 관련된 요건들이 어떤 식으로 결말이 날지는 다른 수식어가 필요 없어 보입니다. 많은 아시아 국가들에 대한 이 알맹이가 빠진 협력 운운이 차라리 아예 없었으면 하는 바람을 갖고 있습니다. 이 역사 문제가 과연 해결될 문제일 수 있을까요. 이 질문에는 모두가 답을 짐작하실 겁니다.
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Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power (review)
BOOK REVIEWS Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power. By Alexis Dudden.
Abstract
BOOK REVIEWS Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power. By Alexis Dudden. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005. 213 pages. Hardcover $45.00. JAMES C. BAXTER International Research Center for Japanese Studies Alexis Dudden takes up a matter of enduring significance and—it seems—everlasting controversy in Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power. How did Japanese government spokesmen and their sympathizers explain Japan’s actions in establishing a protectorate in Korea in 1905 and in annexing the peninsula in 1910, and why did the dominant nations of the day acquiesce so readily in this phased extirpation of the Korean state? How was it that the outside world, or anyway all the powerful states that defined legality in international relations, accepted the legitimacy of Japan’s claims? Focusing on “the discursive aspects of Japan’s annexation of Korea” (p. 2), Dudden sets an agenda that contrasts with earlier Western scholarship on the subject. The books that have generally been thought of as the standard treatments in English, Hilary Conroy’s The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1868–1910: A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960) and Peter Duus’s The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (University of California Press, 1997) are hefty, broad-ranging studies that concentrate basically on political and diplomatic history. Dudden does not engage in detailed analysis of the politics of imperialism and nationalism such as occupied her eminent forerunners. She examines instead the rhetoric of Japanese and Koreans who played parts in the events leading up to annexation, and she puts their use of terms such as “sovereignty” (kunshuken), “independence” ( jishu), “protectorate” (hogokoku), and “annexation” (heigô) into the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international discourse about national sovereignty and legitimacy. Displaying a nice dramatic sense, Dudden begins her first chapter, “Illegal Korea,” with an account of the appeal made by representatives of Korea’s Emperor Kojong at the 1907 International Conference on Peace at the Hague. The envoys attempted to get a hearing for their assertion that the protectorate agreement of 1905, which provided for Japanese takeover of Korean foreign affairs, among other things, was invalid. The forty-three nations participating in the conference, however, were unwilling to risk undermining the international order by listening to them. The international community had accepted the concept of a protectorate two decades earlier. Dudden links the thinking about protectorates to “race-driven theories of civilization” that “shaped a Euro-American political climate” (p. 9). The discourse and politics of “enlightened exploitation,” as she labels it, legalized Japan’s actions. From the early days of their regime, “[f]or the architects of Meiji Japan, building the new nation-state necessarily meant creating one that would engage openly with the world in international terms” (p. 31). In chapter 2, Dudden reviews some of the history of Japanese encounters with those terms. Before the Restoration, Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law was being studied by Japanese scholars in William Martin’s Chinese translation and also in a bakufu-sponsored synoptic version in Japanese. Nishi Amane’s Bankoku kôhô, a transcription of his notes on lectures by Simon Vissering in Leiden between 1862 and 1866, was published in 1868. Antibakufu intellectuals, too, took part in the effort to interpret and domesticate the new Western terminology; Dudden gives us the example of Shigeno Yasutsugu, who put his own Japanese and Martin’s Chinese on facing pages of an edition of Wheaton’s text for the lord of Satsuma. Tutoring Meiji officials on “The Vocabulary of Power” (as Dudden titles her third chapter), Gustave Boissonade provided critical counsel in 1875–1876 when Japan was negotiating a new Treaty of Peace and Friendship with reluctant Koreans. The French legal scholar continued to give highly useful advice throughout his long (1873–1895) employment by the Japanese state, and his way of thinking about the relationships among nations was internalized by opinion leaders both in and out of government. No one absorbed the logic and language of the European-dominated system better than Itô Hirobumi, who one-upped Li Hongzhang by negotiating the 1885 Tianjin Convention in English (pp...
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morning Os rated it it was ok
Shelves: japanese-history, colonial-studies, reviewed
Easy argument and easy research. Over-emphasis on the power of the language, and there is no deep conceptual analysis over those who controlled the language were limited to those who had military power. The most frustrating thing (among many) is that the "international legal community" is given and unchanging in her analysis. The value of language changed dramatically during the first three decades of the 20th century world-wide. The book did not reflect it at all. The author does not really achieve "beyond Japan as copycat theory" as it self-claimed. (less)
Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power (review)
Abstract
Alexis Dudden starts with a promising premise that discourse—particularly that of international law—was as significant as politics, economics, and military power in enabling Japan's annexation of Korea. She sidesteps the issue of causality but "aims to confound the view that only military strength truly prevails in power politics" (p. 4). After a short introduction, she focuses on the Hague Incident. The next chapter reviews how the new vocabulary of international law infused Meiji foreign policy. Chapter three looks at how this "vocabulary" was used in the colonization of Korea. Chapter four, "Voices of Dissent," describes the activities of Tarui Tōkichi, Kōtoku Shūsui, and Hŏ Wi. Chapter five outlines Gustave Boissonade's contributions to Japanese modern law, legal discourses mobilized during the buildup to 1910, and the "105 Persons Incident." The final chapter, "Coda: A Knowledgeable Empire," is composed of brief sections on Nitobe Inazō, Tōyō Kyōkai, and "Concluding Notes." The section on the Hague Incident reminds us that the failure of Korean emissaries to gain entry into the official conference halls was not only due to politics, but also stemmed from larger issues of language and representation. This contrasts with some existing scholarship that overlooks the larger discourse of legality and civilization permeating the Hague conference. Chapter three's section on Durham Stevens is lively, making good use of quotations from the San Francisco Chronicle. The underused Hōritsu shinbun provides the basis for a brief discussion of two key figures in the construction of a "modern" legal regime in Korea, Ume Kenjirō and Kuratomi Yūzaburō. The occasional "theoretical" nods are welcome, although I would have preferred more extensive engagement with the relevant theories. Unfortunately, the moments of solid scholarship are undermined by problems that range from technical issues to thin contextualization and loose argumentation. To start with the technical, the index is sparse, characterized by omissions of major figures. Several endnotes lead to underdeveloped observations about contemporary parallels. Other endnotes for crucial assertions contain citations without page numbers. Particularly frustrating is Dudden's repeated omission of page numbers in major works by two leading scholars of the "annexation," Moriyama Shigenori and Unno Fukuju. This is highly problematic when she hints at major disagreements but fails to provide specifics. Transliteration errors are ubiquitous. Too many book and article titles (generally Korean ones) do not follow any standard system, while missing macrons and misplaced diphthongs are common. Several Korean names are fumbled. For example, among the authors, Yi Yŏnsuk is rendered as "Ri Yoonsuk" (from katakana at that), while Kim Kilsin is misread as "Kim Kosin." To cite one example among historical figures misidentified, the long-time editor of the Chōsen shinbun, Gondō Shirōsuke, becomes "Kendō Shirosuke." The most egregious errors are with names of several prominent Koreans for the entirety of the book: An Chunggŭn becomes "An Chŭnggun"; Yi Ŭn is transformed into "Yi Yun"; Song Pyŏngjun is rendered "Sŏng Bongjun"; and Yi Wi-jong is mistransliterated as "Yi Ŭi-jong." When she conflates Hayashi Tadasu (foreign minister) with Hayashi Gonsuke (not "Gonosuke"—minister plenipotentiary in Seoul), she amalgamates the different roles each played in the road to annexation (in fact, Hayashi Tadasu is never identified although he is the individual she means to be discussing in most instances). The fact that both Hayashis have published memoirs merely amplifies the magnitude of the error. The technical issues are compounded by thin contextualization and research. Many books and articles listed in the bibliography are never cited. This is vexing when published works highly relevant to discussions in the text are listed but never used. Even books that should have been discussed as a part of the historiographic context, most notably Kim Key-hiuk's, are elided. Furthermore, numerous directly relevant secondary books and articles in Japanese and English (let alone Korean) are missing from the bibliography, while works of tenuous relevance are listed in abundance. Contemporary sources are also given short shrift. The Government General of Chōsen published numerous volumes related to "developments" in criminal and civil law, and yet only one Government General publication, aside from...
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Introduction
1
1
7
2 3 4 5
Illegal Korea International Terms of Engagement
27
The Vocabulary of Power
45
Voices of Dissent
74
Mission Législatrice
100
Coda: A Knowledgeable Empire
131
Notes
147
Bibliography
185
Index
209
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to too many teachers, friends, and family members for these few paragraphs to suffice, and many of these people fall into each category anyway, so my attempts are muddled from the start. I simply wish that I could win the lottery and get everyone together for a “Babette’s feast” to thank you all. Tetsuo Najita is a wonderful historian, and I will always be lucky to call him my adviser. Prasenjit Duara and Bruce Cumings challenged and expanded my questions in ways that I still haven’t begun to address, and Norma Field demonstrated the importance of examining the world with compassion at all times. Carol Gluck and Jim McClain were my first teachers of Japan, and in many ways they brought this book into being. Bill Sibley showed that without friendship there is no use for any of it, and Igarashi Akio remains too generous with time, space, and sake to thank in words. Any mistakes are, of course, mine, but Andre Schmid is responsible for this book. As I was blithely heading off to graduate school, he told me that I would never understand modern Japan without studying Korea. He was right, of course, but I didn’t know why until Han Suk-Jung became my teacher and friend and explained to me the human dimensions of Japan’s empire and the world in its wake. In this regard, I will also always look forward to learning from Melissa Wender. Geoff Klingsporn, Mark Schmeller, Alexandra Gillen, and Linda Zuckerman were the best friends, critics, and sparring partners that anyone could hope for during the delights of writing a dissertation. Chris Hill, Sarah Thal, Jonathan Field, Billy Hinton, Paul Gilmore, Sarah Rose, Kevin Bogart, Mark Bradley, Lydia Liu, Namhee Lee, David Ambaras, David Leheny, Angus Lockix
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Acknowledgments
yer, Doug Howland, Tanaka Shinichi, Rob Oppenheim, Amanda Seaman, Sarah Frederick, Kris Troost, Karen Wigen, Mark Lincicome, Andy Gordon, Mark Selden, and especially Mark Caprio and Mike Molasky offered advice, music, and humor throughout this project, and the big Australian cane toad, Hayden Lesbirel, gave strength and friendship as things got a little more exciting than usual toward its end. Colleagues and students at Connecticut College have been tremendously helpful during a series of tar pits encountered on the road toward this book, and I am especially grateful to Lisa Wilson, Marc Forster, Cathy Stock, Sarah Queen, Tristan Borer, Janet Gezari, Lorraine McKinney, Alex Hybel, Tony Crubaugh, and Jeff Lesser. Support from Connecticut College as well as the Fulbright board, the Mellon Foundation, the University of Chicago, and the NEH made it all possible. My late colleague at Seoul National University, Kim Jangkwon, and the students in our seminar suffered through the manuscript’s final stages with me, and I will always be especially thankful to them, as well as to Professor Kim Ki-seok, for inviting me there. In uncanny ways, Sam Perry has been with me since the conception of these pages, and there will always be a Sam Suite waiting for you, provided, of course, that we can race off at a moment’s notice to places of nationalist frenzy wherever we are. Kobayashi Tsuyoshi, Takahashi Jin, Sakamoto Ayumi, the Yoshidas, and Kodama Nobuko made making this book a lot more fun. So did Song Daehon, and I promise that the next one won’t make your eyes go round in circles. What he doesn’t know, though, is how much better the book is now than it was before Madge Huntington, Joe Parsons, Suzy Kim, Karen Kodner, Ann Ludeman, and my excellent editor, Patricia Crosby, took charge. My Japanese parents, the Ichinoses, have been a home away from home for years, and my grandmother, Muzzie, was patient throughout. Adrianne and Arthur Dudden have been supportive beyond understanding, and I dedicate the following pages to them. Finally, there is no way to thank Robert Gay. We’ll just have to have dinner together.
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Japan’s Colonization of Korea
Introduction
Translating international law into Japanese and using its terms in practice were among the most transformative aspects of Japan’s Meiji era (1868–1912). Doing so gave Japanese rulers a new method of intercourse with the United States and Europe and enabled them to reorder the vocabulary of power within Asia. Moreover, this discourse inscribed the legitimacy of Japan’s empire from the time of its creation. Although historians of modern Japan have long studied the staggering changes in Japan’s social, political, and economic fabric at the turn of the last century, they have paid less attention to the internal discourses that arose as Japan’s leaders described the country anew. To neglect these discourses is to ignore a critical element in the making of imperial Japan. The island nation had intentionally isolated itself for centuries, and the Meiji government used new discourses so that Japan would make new international sense, at a time when not making sense in this manner rendered a nation ripe for colonization. In the terminology of the day, the world’s emerging colonial powers viewed countries that shunned specific forms of international relations—particularly commercial relations—as “backward” or “barbaric.” In the face of new global terms of power, Tokyo policymakers created language to describe Japan’s rapid industrialization, mass militarization, and territorial expansion. The challenge for these officials was to craft a vocabulary that was consistent both with traditional Japanese practices and Japan’s new aspirations, and that was, furthermore, intelligible to an international audience. The encoders of Japan’s new place in the world never defined themselves collectively, but their efforts converged along mutual lines. The resulting dis1
2
Introduction
courses captured foreign terms to the fullest extent possible and presented Japan’s new policies as legitimate. In the process, the policymakers created perceptions of the justness of imperialist practices around the world at the time. Thus, rather than distinguishing the Japanese empire from others, these efforts confirmed Japan’s place in the international history of global empire. Unlike other diplomatic histories and imperialism studies, this book traces the construction and dispersion of terms that are too often considered transhistorical. Many scholars have ignored Japan’s discursive shift in this regard by assuming the naturalness of concepts such as sovereignty and independence, or they have blurred Japan’s intellectual history by describing the transition as yet another example of the “copycat Japanese.” Writing treaties and conducting diplomacy was by no means a new practice in Meiji Japan, but executing such transactions in the language of international law required new techniques. The scholars and state aggrandizers who translated international terms into Japanese did not create the imperialist nation that Japan would become. Their fluent use of this discourse, however, legitimated Japan’s imperialist claims within Japan and abroad. The Meiji regime’s incorporation of Hokkaido (1869), Okinawa (1871), Taiwan (1895), and the southern part of Sakhalin (1905) into the Japanese empire laid the groundwork for later imperialist expansion. Although Japan did not officially annex Korea until 1910, throughout the late nineteenth century, Meiji rulers in Korea vied doggedly with Europe and the United States over strategic privileges, mining and railroad rights, and souls to proselytize. Because it was important for Japan to engage other nations in competition, Meiji officials recognized that the need was more critical for Japan’s new policies toward Korea to make sense than for the country’s other colonial schemes. Within Japan’s expanding empire, therefore, the annexation of Korea significantly established the perceived legitimacy of Japan as a modern imperial nation. During the years between Japan’s opening of Korea in 1876—an opening that self-consciously mimicked the U.S. opening of Japan in 1853—and Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, Japan’s legal theorists, politicians, and translators defined the country’s Korean policy as legitimate under international law. The international arena’s quick and formally uncontested sanction of this act in 1910 confirmed the significance of these endeavors to Japan’s future empire. In the chapters that follow, I examine the discursive aspects of Japan’s annexation of Korea, with particular attention to the international legality of that moment. The international politics of imperialism taught Meiji state
Introduction
3
aggrandizers that, if they were to gain full legitimacy for Japan as a colonizing nation, they needed to define their policies in mutually referential terms of law. Colonizing politics were above all a reflexive process; therefore, even before Japan annexed Korea in 1910, its leaders determined to demonstrate that their nation had embarked on a legal and often legislating mission—a mission législatrice—to Korea. Japan’s endeavor to make its annexation of Korea legal in the eyes of the international community brings into relief a forgotten, yet highly significant, component of the process of Japan’s development as an imperialist power at the outset of the twentieth century. History largely recounts the dominator’s story at the expense of the dominated. Nevertheless, looking at it here brings to light numerous overlooked presumptions of the so-called international system while describing Japan’s engagement with that system, and it is only by following this story that it is possible to imagine writing the script anew for a more balanced world. Japanese and Korean readers are sufficiently aware of this topic and are not surprised by the question, “Was Japan’s annexation of Korea legal?” In fact, they might be tired of it. A reader from a so-called Western narrative tradition, however, might be taken aback to learn that this question not only resonates in daily life in these countries but also periodically explodes into major diplomatic and political incidents. Such a reader might be tempted to dismiss the problem as local or, worse, “Asian,” when in fact it entwines with histories of imperialism around the world, raising questions about how related issues linger in contemporary international relations. Since the collapse of Japan’s empire in 1945, Japan’s and Korea’s respective stances on the question of the 1910 annexation have been, at different moments and on different levels, at the core of national self-definition. To varying degrees, the official Japanese response maintains that the annexation was legal. The “party line” necessitates that Japan simply did what the other imperialist nations of the world were doing at the time. The logic is not wrong per se, but almost sixty years after the end of the empire this line of argument merely perpetuates the “authorized” view of the twentieth century, which continues to present Japan as a victim of the times. Conversely, and almost without exception, the official Korean position is that the annexation in 1910 was illegal. This position, however, is made more complex by the fact that South Korea and North Korea—two governments that remain officially at war today—speak in unison on an issue that arguably contributed to the civil war that divided them. One of the most cogent points of agreement in current Korean reunification talks categorically declares Japan’s past colonization of
4
Introduction
the Korean peninsula as “illegal,” thus sidetracking the sticky issue regarding which Koreans benefited from Japan’s rule. Unfortunately, therefore, the debate over annexation follows an endless Möbius strip, but it is vital to consider this seemingly endless question anew because the dispute lies at the heart of many postcolonial and postenslavement claims now heard throughout the world. Simply put, it is necessary to alter the question and examine what constituted legal at the time in order to understand what was upheld as legitimate practice. Several groundbreaking works have analyzed Japan’s annexation of Korea and Korea’s place in Japan’s empire, but the field continues to be ensnared in a logic that measures Japanese imperialism against apparent Western norms.1 The failure to incorporate Japan’s empire into general theories of imperialism remains a fatal flaw of such studies and of international studies in general.2 Specialists on imperialism and Japan alike stumble by overlooking the Japanese empire or assuming that anyone who is interested can plug the empire’s history into European theoretical models, which sustains the idea that Japan’s experience is somehow less than that of places where history is presumed to have occurred normally. It is possible, however, to circumvent this problem by analyzing how the terms of international law entered modern Japan’s discourse of power. The thinkers and translators who refracted international law into Japanese knew that its original terms were European, but many believed that making these terms Japanese would define Japan as a member of the “civilized world.” By illustrating the fusion of power and words, this book aims to confound the view that only military strength truly prevails in power politics. Within an astonishingly short period of time, the Meiji government wrested the privilege of defining legal concepts away from China and conferred on Japan the status of being Asia’s twentieth-century arbiter of power. The international colonial order of knowledge legitimated Japan’s annexation of Korea and gave basis to the racially charged assumptions of international exchange at the time. In chapter 1, I describe the global atmosphere that declared Japan the legal ruler of Korea. Chapter 2 frames the significance of the discourse of international law with a brief intellectual history of how its terms became Japanese. In chapter 3, I bring together these discussions by analyzing how Meiji Japan’s leaders embedded this discourse into legal precedent for Japan, particularly in the country’s relations with Korea. Chapter 4 considers how the Meiji government penalized critics at home and abroad when their understandings challenged state definitions. And, in chapter 5, I analyze the relationship between percep-
Introduction
5
tions of Japan as a legal nation and the government’s reordering of the terms of jurisprudence within Japan and Korea, focusing in particular on how such perceptions related to extraterritorial privilege. In a fulsome concluding section, I square the book’s examination of the legality of Japan’s imperialist designs by discussing the place of colonial policy studies in Japan at the time. In so doing, I demonstrate how this new discipline further created a common sense that Japan’s empire accorded to knowledgeable practice. Although the international arena sanctioned Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, later on, when Japanese leaders maintained that their empire’s extension into parts of north China was similarly legitimate, Japan’s former allies began to oppose Japanese imperialism and militarism. In the argument of the day, relations devolved into a devastating but inevitable war to stop Japanese expansion, and the book closes on this point of tension. Although it is tempting to declare colonial conquest illegal at any time, doing so will not calm the memories of colonial oppression or eradicate the existence of related and ongoing forms of domination. To these ends, we continue to need a more sophisticated understanding of how power works. The pages that follow explore how imperialism’s apologists described the legality of their enterprise, attempting to weigh the implications of their actions in the international arena of the early twentieth century and beyond.
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CHAPTER 1
ILLEGAL KOREA
I n the summer of 1907, the world declared Korea illegal. The previous autumn, Emperor Kojong of Korea sent three representatives on his behalf to the Second International Conference on Peace at The Hague. Their mission was to register the emperor’s protest against Japan’s 1905 protectorate agreement over Korea. According to the well-known account of their travels over˘ ijong reached the Netherlands in land to Europe, Yi Sangso˘l, Yi Jun, and Yi U late June 1907, during the second week of the conference. They carried a letter from their emperor detailing the invalidity of the protectorate and demanding international condemnation of Japan.1 Although the three young men appealed to diplomats from countries that had long-standing relations with Korea, none except the Russian envoy gave them more than a passing notice. Not coincidentally, of course, Japan’s shocking military victory against Russia two years earlier made St. Petersburg eager to support any protest of Japan. On arriving at The Hague, the Korean emissaries confronted a belief system to which even the Russians had acquiesced. According to the terms of international law—the same ones used to script the conference at The Hague and legitimate the participant states—the Koreans could not legally attend the forum. The Portsmouth Treaty of 1905 secured peace between Japan and Russia, granted Japan the privilege to “protect its interests in Korea,” and garnered a Nobel Peace Prize for President Theodore Roosevelt, who orchestrated the negotiations.2 Shortly thereafter, the Second Japan-Korea Agreement named Korea a Japanese protectorate and gave international legal precedent to Japan’s control over Korea’s foreign affairs.3 As a result, the Koreans could not conduct their own foreign relations. Instead, all of Korea’s foreign affairs would be con7
8
Japan’s Colonization of Korea
ducted by Tokyo. According to international law, without Japan, Korea no longer existed in relation to the rest of the world. At The Hague, the Koreans’ appeal was collectively shunned by the delegates sent from the forty-three countries discussing world peace. The Koreans’ attempt to protest—to tell their story—interfered with the world order that the delegates sought to legitimate. According to anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, some historical moments run so deeply against prevailing ideologies that they are “unthinkable.” In these situations, Trouillot notes, “worldview wins over the facts.” 4 Because the Korean envoys demanded rectification in the very terms that oppressed them, they were unable to bring the international community to recognize Korea as an independent country. As a result, their story was “unthinkable” to the organizers of the conference. Conversely, recognition of the Koreans’ claims to independence would have dismantled the worldview that not only determined Korea’s dependence on Japan but also legitimated the conference’s claim to define the meaning of international peace. In practice, of course, this definition of peace meant that certain countries legally controlled and colonized others. In the early twentieth century, colonization was legal under international law in the way that slavery was once legal. The politics and laws of imperialism resembled the politics and laws of the slave trade and arguably developed from them.5 In the mid-nineteenth century, many European and American legal theorists viewed slavery as unfortunate. Nonetheless, they maintained that the practice was for the good of the slaves and that the world’s emergent colonial powers operated the slave trade in accordance with prevailing international laws. A large body of literature in political economy and social theory supported these claims. Several decades later, the avatars of imperialism framed the central provisions of international law in ways that defended their activities. It is not surprising then that they, too, relied on a substantial literature to support their belief in the moral value of annexations, protectorates, and spheres of influence. Like the environment embracing slavery, the terrain that grounded imperialism reveals how the politically powerful determined what was legal and protected that legality to uphold their power and selfinterests. A discourse I call “enlightened exploitation” informed this historical atmosphere and encompassed the vocabulary of laws and diplomatic agreements, as well as journalistic accounts describing international relations.6 Various dimensions of this discourse are brought into relief throughout this book, but
Illegal Korea
9
for now the concept of the “protectorate” can introduce the reach of enlightened exploitation. A diplomatic protocol signed at the Berlin Conference in 1885 defined navigation rights in the Belgian Congo, thus establishing the concept of a “protectorate” as a particular piece of territory governed in part by an alien regime.7 Of equal importance at the time, race-driven theories of civilization more generally shaped a Euro-American political climate that ordered a taxonomy of the peoples of the world. So-called civilized governments predicated their claims to legitimacy on conquering and ruling socalled barbaric ones; such governments also infused their claims with political and social theories derived in part from nascent evolutionary sciences. A regime was civilized only if it could claim the ability to transform an uncivilized people.8 The logic of the politics of enlightened exploitation can be described as the practice of legalizing the claim to protect a place inhabited by people who were defined as incapable of becoming civilized on their own. It was understood, of course, that the protecting regime had access to the material and human resources of the place it protected. Ultimately, the ability to control colonial space defined a nation as “sovereign” and “independent.” Regimes that sought to dominate others legitimated their actions in terms consistent with this intellectual order. Declaring a territory a protectorate did not merely apply a euphemism to the action of taking over; it established a legal precedent for defining certain people unfit to rule themselves.9 Although Japan did not annex Korea until 1910, the fallout from The Hague affair enabled the Japanese colonial regime in Seoul to eviscerate the Korean state by the end of 1907. The judgment at The Hague in the summer of 1907—more specifically, the international turning of a deaf ear to the Koreans—allowed Japanese officials to broaden control of the country on which they and their predecessors had been encroaching for almost fifty years. In 1876, Japan followed the international pattern of forcibly opening countries to trade by securing the Treaty of Kanghwa with the Choso˘n government of Korea. As a result of this treaty, Japanese merchants and diplomats moved into extraterritorial settlements in Korea that were legally determined. Following another international practice, Tokyo stationed troops to protect these compounds. The same troops later went to war with China (1894–1895) and Russia (1904–1905) in the name of defending Japanese and Korean national interests. When Japan fought and defeated Russia, it did so, Japan claimed, in order to liberate Korea. Thus, because of its apparent beneficence, Japan received Korea as its protectorate from the international community. The 1907 Korean mission to The Hague to protest this prize, therefore,
10
Japan’s Colonization of Korea
embarrassed Japanese officials in front of the nations whose policies they were emulating. They demanded the abdication of the Korean emperor on learning of his secret emissaries. The Japanese officials used pliable Korean government ministers such as Yi Wanyong and So˘ng Bongjun—men often known in Korean history books as “traitors for all times”—by assigning them to urge Emperor Kojong to place his son, Sunjong, on the throne.10 Sunjong, the final sovereign of Korea’s Choso˘n era (1392–1910), embodied “puppet sovereignty” as much as if not more than the better known “Last Emperor” of China, Pu Yi, whom the Japanese controlled in Manchuria in the 1930s.11 In 1907, the “last emperor” of Korea condemned the men who had gone to The Hague on behalf of his father. Japan’s strong response to the Korean mission centered international attention on Seoul. Comments to the press by Japanese leaders in the summer of 1907 revealed an official self-consciousness that Japan’s policies were on display. On July 25, Foreign Minister Hayashi Gonosuke told a reporter from the Associated Press that the Korean mission to The Hague was not a consideration in Japan’s desiring a new ruler in Korea, or, for that matter, control over Korea’s judiciary. He emphasized instead that “the provisions of the new agreement [July 1907] were not anticipated in the protectorate agreement in 1905, and they complete our project. The Korean deputation to The Hague was inherently unimportant.” 12 In short, Hayashi’s narrative explained Japan’s forced abdication of Korea’s sovereign and its takeover of domestic laws as standard operating procedures in colonial politics. His detailed explanations were perhaps unnecessary, since the Times of London had already given its blessing: “We ourselves have had such long experience of dealing with barbaric or semi-barbaric potentates that we can easily appreciate the position of the Japanese in Korea.” 13 The Meiji government made the most of the momentum behind its actions, displaying Japan’s increasingly exploitative relations with Korea as the natural course of events. Despite the broad implications of the new 1907 agreement between Japan and Korea, no official challenge to its legitimacy arose in the international arena.14 As the world watched and commented on Emperor Kojong’s abdication, Japan’s Resident General Itö Hirobumi signed papers with Korean Prime Minister Yi Wanyong, transferring all judicial powers in Korea to Japan’s command. In the atmosphere that sustained Japan as the legal guardian of Korea, there was only praise for Japan’s further means of control: “Under the new Convention, the Marquis Ito’s first measure aims at
Illegal Korea
11
securing life and property in Korea by substituting pure and competent tribunals of justice for the present and unskilled law Courts.” 15 Prior to the 1907 agreement, the Japanese government had not publicized the contents of high-level diplomatic exchanges between Japan and Korea. In contrast, from the moment that Itö and Yi affixed their seals to the new convention, officials distributed copies to Japanese and foreign papers.16 In 1905, the small portion of the world that bothered to notice Japan’s protectorate agreement over Korea upheld that action, and Korea lost its international existence.17 In 1907, a much larger audience watched what Japan was doing, and it applauded Tokyo’s removal of Korea’s internal existence. Although a Korean sovereign still sat on the throne, and although the Japanese government demurred that Korea was not officially a Japanese colony, Japanese administrators in Seoul gained control of every office that once constituted a functioning Korea. The international atmosphere that declared Korea an illegal nation and Japan a legal one bred itself on the erasure of certain countries, similar to the political economy of slavery that labeled some humans the owners and traders of other humans. The discourse of enlightened exploitation gave these actions normative support. Literary critic Nishikawa Nagao has explained that Meiji-era politicians understood that the terms of international law generated a world in which “only European-style, civilized countries were seen as sovereign states. Only these states—the subjects (shutai) of international law —had the right to intervene in or conquer undeveloped or semi-developed countries.” 18 During the Meiji period, Japanese state aggrandizers worked to embed Japan as a subject in this international formula of power. At the time, international laws justified colonial control over territory and people as a modern form of enslavement. These laws were upheld and practiced as Japan’s law over Korea. When the time came for Japanese officials to appear on the world stage, they knew to manipulate unprincipled Korean politicians (such as Yi Wanyong and So˘ng Bongjun) to do the historically damning work of forcing Kojong to abdicate; by these actions, they functioned as imperialist powers everywhere did, relying on local officials for corrupt tasks. These moves by Japanese officials affirmed the smug “appreciation” felt in England and elsewhere concerning the self-justifying morality of enslaving certain places and people. By such logic, certain countries were not fit to rule themselves, and there was little regard for the coercive methods employed to bring about these conditions.
12
Japan’s Colonization of Korea
Most important, Japan’s erasure of Korea blended into the era’s other “thinkable” stories. With odd resonance for today’s world, one commentator at the time noted that “the oppressed nationalities of the world [who made their voices heard at The Hague conference] . . . were the Albanians, Armenians, Bosnians, Coreans, Georgians, and Herzegovinians . . . and individual appeals were received from Boers, Egyptians, and Irishmen.” 19 The noticeable similarities between the “oppressed nationalities of the world” at the beginning of the twentieth century and also the beginning of the twenty-first century convince me that it remains worthwhile to examine how the international arena of 1907 disqualified certain groups from membership and made them legally dependent on those that did belong. This process is, in a word, the focus of this book. This historical discourse, defining some nations as legal subjects and others as their objects of control, became entwined with the development of global empire. As discourses do, this one worked recursively to confirm itself. Moreover, this discourse upheld imperialist politics as legitimate practice and, in doing so, advanced the expansion of empire. Although it would be a mistake to say that the international terms of enlightened exploitation made nations imperialist, these terms did legitimate imperialist policies as legal. In the age of empire, the nations that defined the language of international relations—and only those nations—were its legal subjects. All the other nations were relegated to legal obscurity. By way of introducing the environment surrounding Japan’s engagement with this discourse of power, this chapter examines world reaction to the failed Korean protest at The Hague. As this historical moment makes clear, the legal erasure of a country and its people could be made legitimate in a relatively open fashion. Beginning in the 1950s with historian Hilary Conroy, American, Japanese, and Korean scholars have described what is now known as “the Korean incident at The Hague” as it played out in official and unofficial channels.20 Although discussing some of the same materials Conroy and others have considered, my reading is unlike theirs in highlighting how the terms of enlightened exploitation had become mundane by the time the Koreans sought to enter the international arena. This international discourse effectively prevented the Koreans from registering their nation as a legal subject, and, through the circular nature of these terms, the Koreans’ attempt at legitimacy only reinforced the judgment of Korea as illegitimate. Looking at the event this way illustrates how it was legal for the world to declare Korea illegal, thus pro-
Illegal Korea
13
viding a deeper understanding of what power meant at a given time and place and how it operated. JAPAN ON DISPLAY
In August 1898, Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II expressed a desire for the “Powers” (as the world’s colonizing nations called themselves collectively at the time) to hold large-scale arms-reduction talks. The conference’s sponsors chose The Hague as their venue, and the world’s first self-proclaimed International Conference on Peace opened on 18 May the following year.21 The Russian government decided that only countries with diplomatic representatives in St. Petersburg could attend the conference, thus from the outset limiting participation to states classified as independent and sovereign by international law. In his assessment of the conference several years later, William Hull pointed out that from the start the tsar made random exceptions: “This general rule was not observed, however, in some notable instances, both in extending the invitation to some powers not represented at the Russian Court (for example, Luxemburg, Montenegro, and Siam), and in withholding it from some others which were so represented (for example, the South African Republic). The Russian government did not offer any official statement of the reasons for its inclusions and exclusions.” 22 The arbitrary nature of the invitation process is significant. From its founding moments, the organizers of a conference that was a forerunner of today’s United Nations made choices that represented de facto the legitimacy and illegitimacy of certain regimes. No other body rivaled The Hague group’s powerful claim to decide international policy, and its decisions were legal because no alternate court existed. If any nation lesser than one of the “Powers” tried to call a decision into question, it would only define that regime as illegal or—in today’s parlance—as a “rogue” or “outlaw” state. While the delegates to the 1899 conference congratulated themselves over the state of civilization, issued platitudes about peace, and motioned for another meeting, the Boer War and Japan’s war with Russia got in the way of their proceedings and forced the participants to postpone the Second International Conference on Peace until June 1907. The list of delegates attending the second meeting updated the roster of the world’s legal nations and set new limits on the international arena. There were twenty parties from Europe and nineteen from the Americas. Persia, Siam, China, and Japan comprised Asia.
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Japan’s Colonization of Korea
Apparently, no legal nation existed in Africa, a decision confirmed by the group’s refusal of the envoy from Egypt. In 1899, representatives had gathered at a small royal palace on the outskirts of the city, but in 1907 organizers felt they needed a larger building, both for the increased number of delegates and the grander expectations of the meeting itself. As the president of the conference, Alexander Nelidoff, proclaimed, “All friends of civilization are following with sympathetic interest,” the meeting opened in an austere, thirteenth-century hunting lodge, the aristocratic Ridderzaal (Hall of Knights).23 Jonkheer van Tets, the Dutch foreign minister, told a reporter that “the hall seemed to us to be worthy to receive the Second Peace Conference,” and an editorial in the Times of London called the conference “a contemporary Areopagus,” referring to the ancient Athenian council. 24 Van Tets also suggested that the building would “acquire a fresh historical fame which will exceed the limits of [its] national history now that within its walls the most completely representative assembly of countries in the world . . . will have been deliberated.” 25 The meeting’s promoters assumed that the authority of their actions made their endeavors legitimate, and on the conference’s opening day, an article in the Times described the scene: [The Ridderzaal], the meeting place of the Conference, dates from the 13th century and was built by William II, Count of Holland and King of the Romans. It is a long, high-roofed edifice and resembles a church with its two round towers flanking the principal entrance. The interior is imposing by reason of height and simplicity. The massive crossed beams that support the roof are of unpolished wood, and the only decoration of the whitewashed walls consists in the arms of the different States of the Netherlands emblazoned on the stone supports of the roofing. The floor of the hall is fitted throughout with desks and benches covered with green velvet. 26 Comparing the structure to a church gave a higher moral foundation to the convention. Plush benches dissected the holy space and mapped out the hierarchy of national delegates. As at the first conference, the common language was French, and nations were listed alphabetically by their French names. Hull noted that even “the alphabet favored the large powers by bringing their delegates to the front . . . the Germans, Americans, and British occupied the first row of seats—still in alphabetical order.” 27 By July, coal magnate Andrew Carnegie was so pleased with what he was reading in the papers and hearing
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from friends that he gave the Dutch government one-and-a-quarter million dollars to construct a new and permanent building for future meetings.28 Japanese delegates came daily to the Hall of Knights, resplendent in their morning coats and top hats, and participating as subjects in international law. The Korean envoys, on the other hand, even in their suits, could not exist in the same space, and their protest does not appear in the official proceedings.29 This moment is crucial to understanding how the erasure of Korea took effect. No judge at The Hague sat behind a bench to try a case called “the legality of Korea.” But then again, no judge had tried the infamous country-swapping cases two years earlier: the Taft-Katsura meeting (July 1905), in which the United States and Japan traded the Philippines for Korea; and the Second Anglo-Japan Alliance (August 1905), in which Japan and England exchanged Korea for India and Burma.30 The delegates who determined the survival of Korea officially represented their governments, but the authority they summoned to erase Korea transcended national levels and rested with the presumed power of international law. When the Korean delegates tried to make their appeal in the summer of 1907, the faceless judge of this higher authority no longer recognized the existence of their country. The law’s earthly representatives—the “knights” at The Hague—ignored the Korean plea, and they made their decision a legal determination. Journalists from countries whose delegates sat at the front of the conference sensationalized the Korean mission and in general agreed with their nation’s representatives about the nonviability of Korea. Their dispatches worked to further inscribe the legitimacy of The Hague delegates’ determination about Korea vis-à-vis Japan for readers around the world. The news generated constant publicity about the conference itself, ensuring the “historic fame” its leaders craved.31 Both the press coverage of the Korean envoys’ attempted entry to the conference and Japan’s reaction reveals how commonplace the discourse of enlightened exploitation had become. The tonal similarity of newspaper articles throughout the so-called civilized world demonstrates that a specific discourse had arisen with the development of knowledge about colonization. David Spurr has described this as a “series of colonial discourses marked by internal repetition, but not by allencompassing totality.” 32 The notion of “internal repetition” usefully explains how, for example, newspapers around the world printed articles that communicated the justness of Japan’s control of Korea, a topic that had little concerned them before. A rhetoric of social Darwinism permeated news stories
16
Japan’s Colonization of Korea
throughout Europe and the United States and sustained the racially driven credo preached by champions of enlightened exploitation: a vigorous people legitimately controlled a stagnant one. Only Russian newspapers condemned the Japanese government’s handling of the Korean secret mission; as mentioned above, this was not surprising in light of lingering animosities from the countries’ recent war to gain control of Korea.33 In newspapers in London, New York, Paris, Frankfurt, and Shanghai, the discourse of enlightened exploitation colored descriptions of the Korean ruler, the Korean people, and how Koreans contrasted with Japanese. In this era of purposeful progress, Emperor Kojong was, for example, “an Oriental despot of the weaker type.” 34 Korea was “amongst the most antiquated of Oriental States a by-word for immovable and unreasonable conservatism.” 35 In London, the Korean emperor was seen as a “backward Sovereign,” “foolish,” and “fatuous.” 36 In Paris, he was “a sovereign out of an operetta . . . incapable of initiative, energy, [or] will.” 37 After the Japanese secured Kojong’s abdication, the New York Times condescended, “Upon the whole, the poor man is in a less pitiable state now.” 38 A report from Frankfurt declared that the new emperor had “a character as tractable as India rubber.” 39 A Frenchman confirmed this view: “[Sunjong] used to follow his father about like a dog, never showed the slightest energy or initiative.” 40 In the racial typology underpinning the category of “Oriental despot,” reporters defined the Korean people as one with their sovereign. An editorial in Paris’s Le Temps declared that the “passivity of the Korean people” rendered them “incapable of all sustained exertion, of all methodical activity.” 41 Even in an article somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the Koreans, their primary defect—according to world opinion—surfaced: “There is, to be sure, much evidence to show that the Koreans, at least the ruling caste, are incapable of carrying on a civilized government.” 42 The vocabulary used in the New York Tribune was clearest of all: “The Law of survival of the fittest prevails among states as well as among plants and animals. Corea has been conspicuously unfit.” 43 The decision by The Hague delegates to deny the Koreans a voice at the peace conference proved sufficient for the journalists, who described Korea as a nation Japan should control. Reporters at once explained and confirmed the common understanding of this determination. In the logic of the survival of the fittest, Japan’s control of Korea was “nothing else than the . . . dominance of a people incredibly clever and strenuous over one which has never stirred out of the sloth of ages.” 44 Informed assumptions about colonizer and colonized were manifest in comparisons of the Koreans and the Japanese. These
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descriptions placed Japan alongside European countries as a colonizing nation. In light of Korea’s past, Le Temps praised, “All travelers and those knowledgeable about Korea are amazed at what has been accomplished in the country since the Japanese established themselves there.” 45 A German newspaper held “a benevolent admiration for the imperturbable decision with which Japan [was] asserting her treaty rights.” 46 In a somewhat cynical, yet revealing, comment, the New York Times wrote, “Ito may say of Korea what Metternich boasted of Italy, that he has reduced it to a ’geographical expression.’” 47 An English-language paper in Shanghai echoed these sentiments: “In the best interests of the world at large such nations [Korea] had better be wiped off the map, and we do not blame Japan for wiping Korea off the map.” 48 Perhaps Britain’s extensive treaty connections with the Japanese government encouraged the Times to express the fullest esteem for Japan’s actions, affirming that Japan’s “reputation as a colonizing Power [was] at stake.” 49 Popular international approval for Japan’s increasing control over Korea demonstrates that, by 1907, Meiji leaders had won support for their policies in Korea, legitimating the ongoing process of “wiping Korea off the map.” The major Japanese newspapers chronicled The Hague affair largely by echoing the international press and government decrees.50 A few editorials elaborated on Japan’s actions as a legal matter, such as Nakamura Shinichi’s pedantic explanation of how Japan’s Korea policy fit into the international system of protectorate arrangements.51 And although most of Japan’s domestic press followed events such as Kojong’s forced abdication with studious understatement, one paper refused to toe the party line and ridiculed the entire affair. In a series of cartoons printed between 18 July and 3 August 1907, the Yorozu Chöhö portrayed what it saw as the absurdity of the Japanese government’s efforts to control its “reputation as colonizing Power.” 52 Kuroiwa Ruikö, the editor of the paper, was known not so much for consistent political views as for being categorically anti-elitist, and the drawings in his paper reflect this by lampooning the self-declared altruism of the international political order and Japan’s desire to exist as a subject in that order.53 The paper’s cartoonists depicted Japan’s hypocrisy in wanting to be a member of a group that justified the superiority of nations in ways that would—if pushed— exclude Japan from membership.54 The first cartoon in the series (Fig. 1) shows Japanese Resident General Itö Hirobumi dressed in a kimono, like an old woman, and chasing after a ragged Korean man. The Korean figure, drawn with the body of a small child and wearing no shoes, might represent either the emperor or one of the envoys
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sent to The Hague.55 Itö Hirobumi (1841–1909), the “George Washington of Japan,” was one of the chief architects of the Meiji government and arguably the most powerful politician of the era. The cartoonist nonetheless saw him and his pretensions as ridiculous. As the kimono-clad Itö chases the diminutive Korean, the Korean runs to four tall men in suits (Euro-Americans), standing in the background and laughing. The caption chastises, “Grandma isn’t too smart letting you out looking so shabby!” In another drawing, Itö and Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Gonosuke sit behind the wheel of a roadster and drive over dogs labeled Kan and Min (the “Korean people”). In yet another cartoon, the former emperor of Korea acts as a puppet-master, manipulating strings attached to his son, the new emperor. The final drawing in the series features a handsome, young Japanese man dressed in a formal kimono and an imported hat, standing next to a pretty, smiling Korean woman (perhaps his wife) who wears the native Korean hanbok and demurely nods toward the man. Their newborn baby (whose gender is not identified) is securely in the man’s arms, and the words Shin Kyöyaku (“New Agreement”) run down its back, referring to the July 1907 accord giving Japan control of Korea’s domestic laws. To the side stands a tall Russian naval officer, hands trembling and sweat beading on his face, as he observes the moment. The caption reads, “When this happens, absolutely nothing can be done.” The colonizer radiates a stereotypical masculine dominance, while the colonized shows only feminine compliance. The youthful couple and the product of their union contrast sharply with the teetering Russian, pointing
FIGURE 1.
A cartoon from Yorozu Chöhö, 18 July 1907
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to how the times have changed and the dynamics and locus of power have shifted. Despite the biting satirical nature of this series of cartoons, it is critical to understand that they and their creators—similar to the Korean secret envoys to The Hague—tried to tell a story that was “unthinkable” to most Japanese. In contrast, pictures such as the one featured on this book’s cover described the “thinkable” story of the day. By the time the Yorozu Chöhö cartoonists criticized the underlying assumptions of Japan’s new international relations, many Japanese had come to believe fervently that their country had already become or was about to become a powerful imperialist nation, deserving of its status. Popular woodblock prints, such as Kobayashi Kiyochika’s depiction of the Japanese army bombarding the Chinese at Pyongyang in 1894 (featured on this book’s jacket), appeared widely in Japanese newspapers around the turn of the century. Often, they were sold separately, sometimes with print runs exceeding 100,000 copies.56 Pictures such as these recounted to Japanese throughout the country the enormously popular story of Japan’s growing international success, a story that unwittingly fueled moments such as the widespread protests in Japan following the country’s victory over Russia. The Hibiya Riots, as they are collectively known, arose first in the fall of 1905 in downtown Tokyo when the terms of Japan’s peace settlement with Russia became public. Not satisfied with mere protectorate rights over Korea, tens of thousands took to the streets to clamor for more war prizes for Japan. Many felt they had sacrificed their own lives and the lives of relatives to win what proved to be a terribly costly war in terms of domestic resources and casualties (a belief repeatedly reinforced in woodblock war prints).57 Protests against what were seen as the paltry spoils spread throughout major cities in Japan. Police arrested more than two thousand demonstrators in Tokyo alone, where at least seventeen died in the rioting. It is important for our discussion to understand that the Hibiya protesters were not angry that Japan wanted to participate as a subject in the international arena, nor were they upset that Japan wanted to control Korea. They were angry because, while the price of rice skyrocketed at home, their government was not winning a larger share of international status, which was to them the “thinkable” outcome.58 As a result, Japan’s increased concessions over Korea during the summer of 1907—the “New Agreement”—seemed to many a matter of course, if not belatedly gained or granted. In the immediate aftermath of The Hague affair in 1907, the Japanese government formally took charge of defining its Korean policies to the world
20
Japan’s Colonization of Korea
community in what can only be described as the self-conscious language of colonial power. The Japanese colonial regime in Seoul decided to begin publishing English-language reports detailing its Korean policies. By having printed explanations ready, Japan sought to avoid being unprepared when foreigners asked questions about its policies in Korea. With these reports, Japan set the terms for any discussion of its policies in Korea that might arise, enabling the Japanese government to control some of the uncertainty that attended journalistic inquiry. For example, following quickly on the Korean mission to The Hague, “His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s Residency General” (or “H.I.J.M’s. R.G.”), as Itö called himself in English, published the first copy of the Annual Report for 1907 on Reforms and Progress in Korea. The project was so successful from the start that it was pursued annually until the collapse of the Japanese empire in 1945.59 Although many scholars have read through these annual reports for statistical information, they have downplayed the historical value of the texts themselves because of what they view as their propagandist nature. The propaganda aspect of the Report, however, offers the key to understanding how Japan’s official narration of its Korean policies meshed with other nations’ colonial discourses, both official and unofficial. For example, the Japanese government relied on formats to describe its policies that the British used in India and that the French used in Algeria, and the Report’s authors established a congruence of meaning for Japan’s colonial policy in Korea through the use of similar terms. The Report flaunted Japan’s efforts in Korea as a wholly civilizing endeavor, a mission civilisastrice. One of the compilers of the 1907 Report was a young bureaucrat named Hishida Seiji. Hishida began working at the Japanese Foreign Ministry shortly after receiving his doctorate in political science in 1905 from Columbia University, where his advisor, the famous international law scholar John Bassett Moore, recommended his dissertation for publication.60 Hishida had thus learned the terminology of great-power politics from one of its leading theorists, and he and those who worked with him in compiling the Report for Itö detailed Japan’s relations with Korea for a like-minded—or at least a similarly educated—audience. The Japanese government sent complimentary copies of these reports to governments whose representatives participated in The Hague conference, as well as to major university libraries in some of those countries.61 According to the Report, the Japanese administrators in Seoul sought only to enlighten the Korean people. The 1907 Report (distributed in early 1908), for example, narrated the pains to which Japan had
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gone to try to make Korea stand on its own in the international arena: “With the hope of making Korea’s independence a reality, Japan employed all the resources of friendly suggestion to induce the former to adopt modern civilized methods. . . . In consequence, however, of jealousy between political parties, nothing resulted but plots and counterplots.” 62 The Report made clear—to an audience familiar with the Koreans’ “unthinkable” behavior at The Hague just months earlier—that the Koreans were unfit to rule themselves and therefore could not participate as subjects in international terms: “[After 1905] Japan had now realized that Korea was not capable of governing herself, and that the policy of maintaining her independence could not be pursued without making certain modifications. . . . Thus Japan took the responsibility of intervention in Korean affairs, after having given the Koreans ample opportunity to prove their fitness for self-government, and after having found them wholly unprepared for the task.”63 It is not difficult to discern the self-aggrandizing aspect of the narrative, but it is crucial to understand that, in applying this aspect, the definers of Japan’s enlightened exploitation integrated Japan’s relations with Korea into a larger international practice. Within Japan, the government opted for an even showier display of its increasing control over Korea. Between the winter of 1907 and the summer of 1910—approximately the interval between The Hague affair and the annexation—the Meiji government paraded the young Korean crown prince,Yi Yun, on well-chaperoned tours of Japan.64 The planning for this visit, as well as the press coverage of his travels, underscores the confidence with which Japan calculated the international and domestic approval of its erasure of Korea. In early August 1907, only days after the Japanese government forced the Korean emperor to abdicate in favor of his son, Resident General Itö announced that he would take the new emperor’s ten-year-old brother, Yi Yun, to Japan to educate him in an “enlightened manner.” 65 Itö’s plan went forward against the strenuous objection of the boy’s mother and various Korean court officials. On 5 December 1907, an entourage including Itö, the prince, two Korean court-appointed teachers, retainers, and guards set sail from Incheon to Shimonoseki. Several months prior to the Korean prince’s departure for Japan, the Japanese crown prince (the future emperor Taishö) had visited Korea himself, and so Japanese newspaper readers had grown accustomed to following such tours. Unlike the Japanese prince’s visit to Korea, however, neither the Korean prince nor his guardians wanted to go to Japan, a point most Japanese never knew.
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In the case of Yi Yun, Japan’s actions certainly could be described as a form of kidnapping. What is more interesting, though, is the extent to which the Japanese government did not hide its actions, but rather displayed its prize. By educating the boy in Japan in an “enlightened manner,” the Meiji regime sought to generate domestic and international commentary on its relations with Korea. Two weeks after leaving Korea, the prince and his entourage arrived at Tokyo’s Shimbashi Station to great fanfare.66 With the Japanese crown prince at the head of the line, hundreds of well-wishers, including members of the Japanese imperial court’s council, cabinet dignitaries, and school groups, as well as countless passersby, heralded the boy’s arrival. The significance of this event cannot be overstated. After centuries of Chinese dominance in East Asia—a region whose source of knowledge was located in the Chinese emperor’s residence—for the first time Japan claimed the privilege of instructing a continental prince in an “enlightened manner.” The era of colonizing politics did not inaugurate the practice of capturing foreign princes for political ends, but, in the discursive practices of enlightened exploitation, educating a foreigner of royal blood in the colonizer’s capital city defined and sustained notions about higher levels of civilization vis-à-vis the visitor’s homeland.67 At this point, the Japanese government seized its advantage. Japanese leaders from the imperial couple down through the ranks of local government employees manipulated the boy’s seemingly innocent presence to anthropomorphize Japanese-Korean relations for the benefit of spectators and newspaper readers throughout Japan. What could have been better material to work with than a barely adolescent boy with regal manners who spoke only a few sentences of imperially inflected Japanese? Following the formula concocted by Meiji statesmen in the 1870s to explain the then-new Japanese emperor’s political existence to his unaware subjects, between 1908 and 1910 the Japanese government organized lavish tours throughout Japan for Yi Yun. Also following earlier practice, Japanese taxpayers footed the bill for the Korean prince’s travels throughout Hokkaido, Aomori, Akita, Sendai, Morioka, Fukushima, Kansai, and the San-in Coast. Apparently Yi Yun and his guides enjoyed some places so much that his hosts took him two and even three times. Historian Takashi Fujitani has explained that the Meiji emperor’s tours in the 1870s served to “bring the emperor down from a godly presence ‘above the clouds’ in Kyoto to become an active and visible agent in politics.” 68 In 1908, the Japanese government did not need to bring the Korean prince down to earth, as it were, but it similarly needed to
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integrate him—on behalf of his country—into the realm of politics as usual for Japan, a politics that increasingly meant Korea as part of Japan. At each stop on Yi Yun’s tours, local officials constructed elaborate welcome arches with Japanese and Korean flags and orchestrated their townspeople into cheers of “banzai,” dances, and military drills in his honor. Although the process of introducing the prince followed the same methods as those used to introduce the young Japanese emperor in the 1870s, local dignitaries and newspaper reporters added an important new component to the mix. The Korean prince, they emphasized, had come to Japan to obtain an education similar to what all subjects of a rapidly “enlightening” Japan were by then privileged to receive.69 Riding the still-surging patriotic waves that followed Japan’s victory over Russia, the Meiji government proudly displayed its control of Korea. The Japanese people who gathered at train stations from Nemuro to Matsue to Nagoya may have known little, if anything, of the Korean mission to The Hague, who Sunjong or Kojong was, or how this boy Yi Yun fit into the puzzle. Even if they did, they might not have cared. As the subjects of Japan welcomed the Korean prince into their neighborhoods, his presence defined and confirmed what local and national officials and journalists were publicizing: their country stood higher on the chain of enlightenment than the boy’s native land. The Japanese government did not plot Yi Yun’s tours as a covert means to justify the official colonization of Korea two years later. It did not have to. The descriptive reactions to the boy’s well-publicized visits solidified into the fact of annexation when it finally took place. As Japanese leaders and newspaper reporters emphasized, Japan had come so far internationally that now foreign royalty came to Japan for enlightenment. During the first few years of the twentieth century, in the self-legitimated taxonomy of the world’s colonizing powers, Korea increasingly ranked as a dependent regime. In what we might productively reconsider as a colonial war, akin to numerous such wars around the world at the time, Japan defeated Russia and won Korea. In 1906, the United States recognized Japan’s victory spoils by deleting “Korea” in the U.S. government’s Record of Foreign Relations and placing it under the category of “Japan.” The change inscribed a shift in political relations that neatly fit into national erasures occurring around the world at the time, such as those in Hawai‘i, New Zealand, and Vietnam. In July 1907, frustrated by their nonreception at The Hague, the Korean envoys set sail for America, hoping to register a formal protest against Japan and plead their case in Washington, D.C.—a place many believed defined the meaning of independence at the time. When news of the Koreans’ departure from London
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reached U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root, he resolved that the men would not be received in any official capacity either in Washington, D.C., or in Oyster Bay, where President Roosevelt was spending his summer vacation. The United States, declared Root, “formally recognized the Japanese control of the foreign relations of Korea.” 70 Analyzing the colonial discourse surrounding Japan’s annexation of Korea allows for a new approach to Japan’s engagement in the politics of the Great Game. The following chapters give prominence to an intellectual history of international relations by examining how and when powerful terms of state interaction began to encircle the globe within a reflexive political discourse. To some, an exploration of such terms may seem excessively detailed, and to others it may seem coldly inconsiderate of human suffering, but this discussion is more than an academic exercise. Common understandings of this era in Japanese studies have long relied on theories of imperialism whose composition ignores the Japanese empire.71 Many analyses, for example, trace a century of imperialist historiography by beginning with J. A. Hobson’s famous 1902 treatise, Imperialism, never recognizing that the Japanese anarchist Kötoku Shüsui predated Hobson by a year with his own scathing condemnation of colonizing politics, entitled Imperialism: Monstrosity of the Twentieth Century.72 Comparativists and scholars of Japan alike tend to plug Japan into studies of Euro-American colonial projects, measuring Japan’s performance against them in some way. Japan was “late.” Japan was “similar” or “different.” Language difficulties exist to be sure, but they exist for the Japanese scholar as well. A far deeper problem persists. Historical theories of international relations sustain the Euro-American Powers and their former colonies as the standards by which historical pasts and presents are defined. By neglecting Japan in these formulations, the civilizational project endures. Only the nations first described as civilized manifest a normal history of imperialism.73 Another related problem arises in trying to fit Japan squarely into such existing imperialism studies. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japan did not come close to the national strength of the “Powers,” according to what many historians since Marx—sympathetic and not—have valued as indicators necessary for imperial conquest.74 Further complicating this problem, historians of Japan’s imperialist development have divided themselves into fairly entrenched political camps according to whether they agree with or are critical of Lenin’s understanding of imperialism. Because the numbers in Japan’s case do not easily concur with Lenin’s determination of imperialism as the
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highest stage of capitalism, scholars from one school of thought have tried to massage official economic statistics in order to amplify their critiques within a larger, Marxist frame of explanation.75 Conversely, other historians who are dismissive of Marx—and also, vehemently, of Lenin—tend to revel in official statistics to discount these ideas as wrong-headed, proving that Japan’s imperialist efforts were “political” and not “economic” in origin.76 Now, at the beginning of a new century, the first group’s line of reasoning feels hackneyed and defeated, while the latter group teeters close to apologism: Japan just did what everyone else was doing. Japan’s imperialist projects were political, but imperialist politics were not discrete from economic endeavors. Reasoning otherwise now works only to privilege twentieth-century Japan as a perennial victim of the times. To describe, for example, Minister of Finance Shibusawa Eiichi’s Meiji industrialization plans as “economic” without connecting these plans to the Japanese empire’s growth, or to remember Itö’s restructuring of Japan into an internationally recognized sovereign state as “political” without acknowledging its economic dimensions, fails to acknowledge the interdependence of these actions. Moreover, separating this history as either economic or political— rather than insisting on both dimensions—encourages contemporary Japanese governments to continue to avoid responsibility for Japan’s twentieth century. This history, of course, includes the forcible removal of millions from Korea, China, and elsewhere to work in factories and sex camps throughout Japan’s empire. Yet the government of Japan can officially maintain that Japan’s empire was politically necessary, and not based on economic considerations; therefore, it maintains that it owes no compensation to its victims. Ironically, scholars overlooking the historical nature of international terms as useful tools for analyzing Japan’s empire risk not only sustaining a sense of the transcendent value of the terms but also reiterate ideologies that once condoned Japan’s expansionistic policies. For example, the legal expression “propinquity”—used by the United States government in the early twentieth century to sanction Japan’s colonial involvement on the Asian continent—has been recycled into the enduring historiographic explanation of the difference between Japanese imperialism and other nations’ imperialist pasts.77 The “Japan-as-different-from-the-norm” approach argues that “as the only nonWestern imperium of recent times, the Japanese colonial empire stands as an anomaly of modern history. . . . To maximize its strength, the effort to assert its presence in Asia—the creation of empire—would have to begin with the domination over neighboring areas close to home.” 78 For many historians,
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this worldview—the “thinkable” story within the field—has defined modern history as Western history, and Japan’s past is seen as an aberration within the expected flow of the linear chronology of modern history. In this book, I attempt to step around this line of reasoning by not presuming that Japan’s colonizing past was a strange occurrence on a predetermined timeline. Japan’s engagement in international terms demonstrates instead how the politics of enlightened exploitation germinated globally in capitalist modernity and how its forms endure. Meiji political theorist Nakae Chömin’s famous treatise, A Discourse on Government by Three Drunkards (1887), provides a fitting segue into the chapters that follow.79 The book’s protagonist, Professor Nankai, holds great faith in the promise of Japan’s new place in the international community. In his customary besotted state, he expounds on the possibilities of this world: “Despite the power of survival of the fittest . . . all more or less recognize international law. . . . Moreover, [the four Powers’] duty in maintaining the balance among nations and their agreement to uphold international law secretly binds their limbs.” 80 Throughout the Discourse, Nankai describes a social Darwinist world of nations. Despite the intersection of this political theory with the workings of international law, Nankai (and arguably his creator) holds faith in the value of these terms to constrain such voracious appetites, concluding that international law would prevent “smaller nations from being annexed.” 81 In practice, however, Japan’s engagement with international law afforded the opposite result. As Japan engaged the terms of international law in describing its policies towards Korea, Meiji diplomats and legal theorists forged a legitimated path to the annexation of Korea in 1910.
x
Introduction
1
1
7
2 3 4 5
Illegal Korea International Terms of Engagement
27
The Vocabulary of Power
45
Voices of Dissent
74
Mission Législatrice
100
Coda: A Knowledgeable Empire
131
Notes
147
Bibliography
185
Index
209
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to too many teachers, friends, and family members for these few paragraphs to suffice, and many of these people fall into each category anyway, so my attempts are muddled from the start. I simply wish that I could win the lottery and get everyone together for a “Babette’s feast” to thank you all. Tetsuo Najita is a wonderful historian, and I will always be lucky to call him my adviser. Prasenjit Duara and Bruce Cumings challenged and expanded my questions in ways that I still haven’t begun to address, and Norma Field demonstrated the importance of examining the world with compassion at all times. Carol Gluck and Jim McClain were my first teachers of Japan, and in many ways they brought this book into being. Bill Sibley showed that without friendship there is no use for any of it, and Igarashi Akio remains too generous with time, space, and sake to thank in words. Any mistakes are, of course, mine, but Andre Schmid is responsible for this book. As I was blithely heading off to graduate school, he told me that I would never understand modern Japan without studying Korea. He was right, of course, but I didn’t know why until Han Suk-Jung became my teacher and friend and explained to me the human dimensions of Japan’s empire and the world in its wake. In this regard, I will also always look forward to learning from Melissa Wender. Geoff Klingsporn, Mark Schmeller, Alexandra Gillen, and Linda Zuckerman were the best friends, critics, and sparring partners that anyone could hope for during the delights of writing a dissertation. Chris Hill, Sarah Thal, Jonathan Field, Billy Hinton, Paul Gilmore, Sarah Rose, Kevin Bogart, Mark Bradley, Lydia Liu, Namhee Lee, David Ambaras, David Leheny, Angus Lockix
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Acknowledgments
yer, Doug Howland, Tanaka Shinichi, Rob Oppenheim, Amanda Seaman, Sarah Frederick, Kris Troost, Karen Wigen, Mark Lincicome, Andy Gordon, Mark Selden, and especially Mark Caprio and Mike Molasky offered advice, music, and humor throughout this project, and the big Australian cane toad, Hayden Lesbirel, gave strength and friendship as things got a little more exciting than usual toward its end. Colleagues and students at Connecticut College have been tremendously helpful during a series of tar pits encountered on the road toward this book, and I am especially grateful to Lisa Wilson, Marc Forster, Cathy Stock, Sarah Queen, Tristan Borer, Janet Gezari, Lorraine McKinney, Alex Hybel, Tony Crubaugh, and Jeff Lesser. Support from Connecticut College as well as the Fulbright board, the Mellon Foundation, the University of Chicago, and the NEH made it all possible. My late colleague at Seoul National University, Kim Jangkwon, and the students in our seminar suffered through the manuscript’s final stages with me, and I will always be especially thankful to them, as well as to Professor Kim Ki-seok, for inviting me there. In uncanny ways, Sam Perry has been with me since the conception of these pages, and there will always be a Sam Suite waiting for you, provided, of course, that we can race off at a moment’s notice to places of nationalist frenzy wherever we are. Kobayashi Tsuyoshi, Takahashi Jin, Sakamoto Ayumi, the Yoshidas, and Kodama Nobuko made making this book a lot more fun. So did Song Daehon, and I promise that the next one won’t make your eyes go round in circles. What he doesn’t know, though, is how much better the book is now than it was before Madge Huntington, Joe Parsons, Suzy Kim, Karen Kodner, Ann Ludeman, and my excellent editor, Patricia Crosby, took charge. My Japanese parents, the Ichinoses, have been a home away from home for years, and my grandmother, Muzzie, was patient throughout. Adrianne and Arthur Dudden have been supportive beyond understanding, and I dedicate the following pages to them. Finally, there is no way to thank Robert Gay. We’ll just have to have dinner together.
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Japan’s Colonization of Korea
Introduction
Translating international law into Japanese and using its terms in practice were among the most transformative aspects of Japan’s Meiji era (1868–1912). Doing so gave Japanese rulers a new method of intercourse with the United States and Europe and enabled them to reorder the vocabulary of power within Asia. Moreover, this discourse inscribed the legitimacy of Japan’s empire from the time of its creation. Although historians of modern Japan have long studied the staggering changes in Japan’s social, political, and economic fabric at the turn of the last century, they have paid less attention to the internal discourses that arose as Japan’s leaders described the country anew. To neglect these discourses is to ignore a critical element in the making of imperial Japan. The island nation had intentionally isolated itself for centuries, and the Meiji government used new discourses so that Japan would make new international sense, at a time when not making sense in this manner rendered a nation ripe for colonization. In the terminology of the day, the world’s emerging colonial powers viewed countries that shunned specific forms of international relations—particularly commercial relations—as “backward” or “barbaric.” In the face of new global terms of power, Tokyo policymakers created language to describe Japan’s rapid industrialization, mass militarization, and territorial expansion. The challenge for these officials was to craft a vocabulary that was consistent both with traditional Japanese practices and Japan’s new aspirations, and that was, furthermore, intelligible to an international audience. The encoders of Japan’s new place in the world never defined themselves collectively, but their efforts converged along mutual lines. The resulting dis1
2
Introduction
courses captured foreign terms to the fullest extent possible and presented Japan’s new policies as legitimate. In the process, the policymakers created perceptions of the justness of imperialist practices around the world at the time. Thus, rather than distinguishing the Japanese empire from others, these efforts confirmed Japan’s place in the international history of global empire. Unlike other diplomatic histories and imperialism studies, this book traces the construction and dispersion of terms that are too often considered transhistorical. Many scholars have ignored Japan’s discursive shift in this regard by assuming the naturalness of concepts such as sovereignty and independence, or they have blurred Japan’s intellectual history by describing the transition as yet another example of the “copycat Japanese.” Writing treaties and conducting diplomacy was by no means a new practice in Meiji Japan, but executing such transactions in the language of international law required new techniques. The scholars and state aggrandizers who translated international terms into Japanese did not create the imperialist nation that Japan would become. Their fluent use of this discourse, however, legitimated Japan’s imperialist claims within Japan and abroad. The Meiji regime’s incorporation of Hokkaido (1869), Okinawa (1871), Taiwan (1895), and the southern part of Sakhalin (1905) into the Japanese empire laid the groundwork for later imperialist expansion. Although Japan did not officially annex Korea until 1910, throughout the late nineteenth century, Meiji rulers in Korea vied doggedly with Europe and the United States over strategic privileges, mining and railroad rights, and souls to proselytize. Because it was important for Japan to engage other nations in competition, Meiji officials recognized that the need was more critical for Japan’s new policies toward Korea to make sense than for the country’s other colonial schemes. Within Japan’s expanding empire, therefore, the annexation of Korea significantly established the perceived legitimacy of Japan as a modern imperial nation. During the years between Japan’s opening of Korea in 1876—an opening that self-consciously mimicked the U.S. opening of Japan in 1853—and Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, Japan’s legal theorists, politicians, and translators defined the country’s Korean policy as legitimate under international law. The international arena’s quick and formally uncontested sanction of this act in 1910 confirmed the significance of these endeavors to Japan’s future empire. In the chapters that follow, I examine the discursive aspects of Japan’s annexation of Korea, with particular attention to the international legality of that moment. The international politics of imperialism taught Meiji state
Introduction
3
aggrandizers that, if they were to gain full legitimacy for Japan as a colonizing nation, they needed to define their policies in mutually referential terms of law. Colonizing politics were above all a reflexive process; therefore, even before Japan annexed Korea in 1910, its leaders determined to demonstrate that their nation had embarked on a legal and often legislating mission—a mission législatrice—to Korea. Japan’s endeavor to make its annexation of Korea legal in the eyes of the international community brings into relief a forgotten, yet highly significant, component of the process of Japan’s development as an imperialist power at the outset of the twentieth century. History largely recounts the dominator’s story at the expense of the dominated. Nevertheless, looking at it here brings to light numerous overlooked presumptions of the so-called international system while describing Japan’s engagement with that system, and it is only by following this story that it is possible to imagine writing the script anew for a more balanced world. Japanese and Korean readers are sufficiently aware of this topic and are not surprised by the question, “Was Japan’s annexation of Korea legal?” In fact, they might be tired of it. A reader from a so-called Western narrative tradition, however, might be taken aback to learn that this question not only resonates in daily life in these countries but also periodically explodes into major diplomatic and political incidents. Such a reader might be tempted to dismiss the problem as local or, worse, “Asian,” when in fact it entwines with histories of imperialism around the world, raising questions about how related issues linger in contemporary international relations. Since the collapse of Japan’s empire in 1945, Japan’s and Korea’s respective stances on the question of the 1910 annexation have been, at different moments and on different levels, at the core of national self-definition. To varying degrees, the official Japanese response maintains that the annexation was legal. The “party line” necessitates that Japan simply did what the other imperialist nations of the world were doing at the time. The logic is not wrong per se, but almost sixty years after the end of the empire this line of argument merely perpetuates the “authorized” view of the twentieth century, which continues to present Japan as a victim of the times. Conversely, and almost without exception, the official Korean position is that the annexation in 1910 was illegal. This position, however, is made more complex by the fact that South Korea and North Korea—two governments that remain officially at war today—speak in unison on an issue that arguably contributed to the civil war that divided them. One of the most cogent points of agreement in current Korean reunification talks categorically declares Japan’s past colonization of
4
Introduction
the Korean peninsula as “illegal,” thus sidetracking the sticky issue regarding which Koreans benefited from Japan’s rule. Unfortunately, therefore, the debate over annexation follows an endless Möbius strip, but it is vital to consider this seemingly endless question anew because the dispute lies at the heart of many postcolonial and postenslavement claims now heard throughout the world. Simply put, it is necessary to alter the question and examine what constituted legal at the time in order to understand what was upheld as legitimate practice. Several groundbreaking works have analyzed Japan’s annexation of Korea and Korea’s place in Japan’s empire, but the field continues to be ensnared in a logic that measures Japanese imperialism against apparent Western norms.1 The failure to incorporate Japan’s empire into general theories of imperialism remains a fatal flaw of such studies and of international studies in general.2 Specialists on imperialism and Japan alike stumble by overlooking the Japanese empire or assuming that anyone who is interested can plug the empire’s history into European theoretical models, which sustains the idea that Japan’s experience is somehow less than that of places where history is presumed to have occurred normally. It is possible, however, to circumvent this problem by analyzing how the terms of international law entered modern Japan’s discourse of power. The thinkers and translators who refracted international law into Japanese knew that its original terms were European, but many believed that making these terms Japanese would define Japan as a member of the “civilized world.” By illustrating the fusion of power and words, this book aims to confound the view that only military strength truly prevails in power politics. Within an astonishingly short period of time, the Meiji government wrested the privilege of defining legal concepts away from China and conferred on Japan the status of being Asia’s twentieth-century arbiter of power. The international colonial order of knowledge legitimated Japan’s annexation of Korea and gave basis to the racially charged assumptions of international exchange at the time. In chapter 1, I describe the global atmosphere that declared Japan the legal ruler of Korea. Chapter 2 frames the significance of the discourse of international law with a brief intellectual history of how its terms became Japanese. In chapter 3, I bring together these discussions by analyzing how Meiji Japan’s leaders embedded this discourse into legal precedent for Japan, particularly in the country’s relations with Korea. Chapter 4 considers how the Meiji government penalized critics at home and abroad when their understandings challenged state definitions. And, in chapter 5, I analyze the relationship between percep-
Introduction
5
tions of Japan as a legal nation and the government’s reordering of the terms of jurisprudence within Japan and Korea, focusing in particular on how such perceptions related to extraterritorial privilege. In a fulsome concluding section, I square the book’s examination of the legality of Japan’s imperialist designs by discussing the place of colonial policy studies in Japan at the time. In so doing, I demonstrate how this new discipline further created a common sense that Japan’s empire accorded to knowledgeable practice. Although the international arena sanctioned Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, later on, when Japanese leaders maintained that their empire’s extension into parts of north China was similarly legitimate, Japan’s former allies began to oppose Japanese imperialism and militarism. In the argument of the day, relations devolved into a devastating but inevitable war to stop Japanese expansion, and the book closes on this point of tension. Although it is tempting to declare colonial conquest illegal at any time, doing so will not calm the memories of colonial oppression or eradicate the existence of related and ongoing forms of domination. To these ends, we continue to need a more sophisticated understanding of how power works. The pages that follow explore how imperialism’s apologists described the legality of their enterprise, attempting to weigh the implications of their actions in the international arena of the early twentieth century and beyond.
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CHAPTER 1
ILLEGAL KOREA
I n the summer of 1907, the world declared Korea illegal. The previous autumn, Emperor Kojong of Korea sent three representatives on his behalf to the Second International Conference on Peace at The Hague. Their mission was to register the emperor’s protest against Japan’s 1905 protectorate agreement over Korea. According to the well-known account of their travels over˘ ijong reached the Netherlands in land to Europe, Yi Sangso˘l, Yi Jun, and Yi U late June 1907, during the second week of the conference. They carried a letter from their emperor detailing the invalidity of the protectorate and demanding international condemnation of Japan.1 Although the three young men appealed to diplomats from countries that had long-standing relations with Korea, none except the Russian envoy gave them more than a passing notice. Not coincidentally, of course, Japan’s shocking military victory against Russia two years earlier made St. Petersburg eager to support any protest of Japan. On arriving at The Hague, the Korean emissaries confronted a belief system to which even the Russians had acquiesced. According to the terms of international law—the same ones used to script the conference at The Hague and legitimate the participant states—the Koreans could not legally attend the forum. The Portsmouth Treaty of 1905 secured peace between Japan and Russia, granted Japan the privilege to “protect its interests in Korea,” and garnered a Nobel Peace Prize for President Theodore Roosevelt, who orchestrated the negotiations.2 Shortly thereafter, the Second Japan-Korea Agreement named Korea a Japanese protectorate and gave international legal precedent to Japan’s control over Korea’s foreign affairs.3 As a result, the Koreans could not conduct their own foreign relations. Instead, all of Korea’s foreign affairs would be con7
8
Japan’s Colonization of Korea
ducted by Tokyo. According to international law, without Japan, Korea no longer existed in relation to the rest of the world. At The Hague, the Koreans’ appeal was collectively shunned by the delegates sent from the forty-three countries discussing world peace. The Koreans’ attempt to protest—to tell their story—interfered with the world order that the delegates sought to legitimate. According to anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, some historical moments run so deeply against prevailing ideologies that they are “unthinkable.” In these situations, Trouillot notes, “worldview wins over the facts.” 4 Because the Korean envoys demanded rectification in the very terms that oppressed them, they were unable to bring the international community to recognize Korea as an independent country. As a result, their story was “unthinkable” to the organizers of the conference. Conversely, recognition of the Koreans’ claims to independence would have dismantled the worldview that not only determined Korea’s dependence on Japan but also legitimated the conference’s claim to define the meaning of international peace. In practice, of course, this definition of peace meant that certain countries legally controlled and colonized others. In the early twentieth century, colonization was legal under international law in the way that slavery was once legal. The politics and laws of imperialism resembled the politics and laws of the slave trade and arguably developed from them.5 In the mid-nineteenth century, many European and American legal theorists viewed slavery as unfortunate. Nonetheless, they maintained that the practice was for the good of the slaves and that the world’s emergent colonial powers operated the slave trade in accordance with prevailing international laws. A large body of literature in political economy and social theory supported these claims. Several decades later, the avatars of imperialism framed the central provisions of international law in ways that defended their activities. It is not surprising then that they, too, relied on a substantial literature to support their belief in the moral value of annexations, protectorates, and spheres of influence. Like the environment embracing slavery, the terrain that grounded imperialism reveals how the politically powerful determined what was legal and protected that legality to uphold their power and selfinterests. A discourse I call “enlightened exploitation” informed this historical atmosphere and encompassed the vocabulary of laws and diplomatic agreements, as well as journalistic accounts describing international relations.6 Various dimensions of this discourse are brought into relief throughout this book, but
Illegal Korea
9
for now the concept of the “protectorate” can introduce the reach of enlightened exploitation. A diplomatic protocol signed at the Berlin Conference in 1885 defined navigation rights in the Belgian Congo, thus establishing the concept of a “protectorate” as a particular piece of territory governed in part by an alien regime.7 Of equal importance at the time, race-driven theories of civilization more generally shaped a Euro-American political climate that ordered a taxonomy of the peoples of the world. So-called civilized governments predicated their claims to legitimacy on conquering and ruling socalled barbaric ones; such governments also infused their claims with political and social theories derived in part from nascent evolutionary sciences. A regime was civilized only if it could claim the ability to transform an uncivilized people.8 The logic of the politics of enlightened exploitation can be described as the practice of legalizing the claim to protect a place inhabited by people who were defined as incapable of becoming civilized on their own. It was understood, of course, that the protecting regime had access to the material and human resources of the place it protected. Ultimately, the ability to control colonial space defined a nation as “sovereign” and “independent.” Regimes that sought to dominate others legitimated their actions in terms consistent with this intellectual order. Declaring a territory a protectorate did not merely apply a euphemism to the action of taking over; it established a legal precedent for defining certain people unfit to rule themselves.9 Although Japan did not annex Korea until 1910, the fallout from The Hague affair enabled the Japanese colonial regime in Seoul to eviscerate the Korean state by the end of 1907. The judgment at The Hague in the summer of 1907—more specifically, the international turning of a deaf ear to the Koreans—allowed Japanese officials to broaden control of the country on which they and their predecessors had been encroaching for almost fifty years. In 1876, Japan followed the international pattern of forcibly opening countries to trade by securing the Treaty of Kanghwa with the Choso˘n government of Korea. As a result of this treaty, Japanese merchants and diplomats moved into extraterritorial settlements in Korea that were legally determined. Following another international practice, Tokyo stationed troops to protect these compounds. The same troops later went to war with China (1894–1895) and Russia (1904–1905) in the name of defending Japanese and Korean national interests. When Japan fought and defeated Russia, it did so, Japan claimed, in order to liberate Korea. Thus, because of its apparent beneficence, Japan received Korea as its protectorate from the international community. The 1907 Korean mission to The Hague to protest this prize, therefore,
10
Japan’s Colonization of Korea
embarrassed Japanese officials in front of the nations whose policies they were emulating. They demanded the abdication of the Korean emperor on learning of his secret emissaries. The Japanese officials used pliable Korean government ministers such as Yi Wanyong and So˘ng Bongjun—men often known in Korean history books as “traitors for all times”—by assigning them to urge Emperor Kojong to place his son, Sunjong, on the throne.10 Sunjong, the final sovereign of Korea’s Choso˘n era (1392–1910), embodied “puppet sovereignty” as much as if not more than the better known “Last Emperor” of China, Pu Yi, whom the Japanese controlled in Manchuria in the 1930s.11 In 1907, the “last emperor” of Korea condemned the men who had gone to The Hague on behalf of his father. Japan’s strong response to the Korean mission centered international attention on Seoul. Comments to the press by Japanese leaders in the summer of 1907 revealed an official self-consciousness that Japan’s policies were on display. On July 25, Foreign Minister Hayashi Gonosuke told a reporter from the Associated Press that the Korean mission to The Hague was not a consideration in Japan’s desiring a new ruler in Korea, or, for that matter, control over Korea’s judiciary. He emphasized instead that “the provisions of the new agreement [July 1907] were not anticipated in the protectorate agreement in 1905, and they complete our project. The Korean deputation to The Hague was inherently unimportant.” 12 In short, Hayashi’s narrative explained Japan’s forced abdication of Korea’s sovereign and its takeover of domestic laws as standard operating procedures in colonial politics. His detailed explanations were perhaps unnecessary, since the Times of London had already given its blessing: “We ourselves have had such long experience of dealing with barbaric or semi-barbaric potentates that we can easily appreciate the position of the Japanese in Korea.” 13 The Meiji government made the most of the momentum behind its actions, displaying Japan’s increasingly exploitative relations with Korea as the natural course of events. Despite the broad implications of the new 1907 agreement between Japan and Korea, no official challenge to its legitimacy arose in the international arena.14 As the world watched and commented on Emperor Kojong’s abdication, Japan’s Resident General Itö Hirobumi signed papers with Korean Prime Minister Yi Wanyong, transferring all judicial powers in Korea to Japan’s command. In the atmosphere that sustained Japan as the legal guardian of Korea, there was only praise for Japan’s further means of control: “Under the new Convention, the Marquis Ito’s first measure aims at
Illegal Korea
11
securing life and property in Korea by substituting pure and competent tribunals of justice for the present and unskilled law Courts.” 15 Prior to the 1907 agreement, the Japanese government had not publicized the contents of high-level diplomatic exchanges between Japan and Korea. In contrast, from the moment that Itö and Yi affixed their seals to the new convention, officials distributed copies to Japanese and foreign papers.16 In 1905, the small portion of the world that bothered to notice Japan’s protectorate agreement over Korea upheld that action, and Korea lost its international existence.17 In 1907, a much larger audience watched what Japan was doing, and it applauded Tokyo’s removal of Korea’s internal existence. Although a Korean sovereign still sat on the throne, and although the Japanese government demurred that Korea was not officially a Japanese colony, Japanese administrators in Seoul gained control of every office that once constituted a functioning Korea. The international atmosphere that declared Korea an illegal nation and Japan a legal one bred itself on the erasure of certain countries, similar to the political economy of slavery that labeled some humans the owners and traders of other humans. The discourse of enlightened exploitation gave these actions normative support. Literary critic Nishikawa Nagao has explained that Meiji-era politicians understood that the terms of international law generated a world in which “only European-style, civilized countries were seen as sovereign states. Only these states—the subjects (shutai) of international law —had the right to intervene in or conquer undeveloped or semi-developed countries.” 18 During the Meiji period, Japanese state aggrandizers worked to embed Japan as a subject in this international formula of power. At the time, international laws justified colonial control over territory and people as a modern form of enslavement. These laws were upheld and practiced as Japan’s law over Korea. When the time came for Japanese officials to appear on the world stage, they knew to manipulate unprincipled Korean politicians (such as Yi Wanyong and So˘ng Bongjun) to do the historically damning work of forcing Kojong to abdicate; by these actions, they functioned as imperialist powers everywhere did, relying on local officials for corrupt tasks. These moves by Japanese officials affirmed the smug “appreciation” felt in England and elsewhere concerning the self-justifying morality of enslaving certain places and people. By such logic, certain countries were not fit to rule themselves, and there was little regard for the coercive methods employed to bring about these conditions.
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Japan’s Colonization of Korea
Most important, Japan’s erasure of Korea blended into the era’s other “thinkable” stories. With odd resonance for today’s world, one commentator at the time noted that “the oppressed nationalities of the world [who made their voices heard at The Hague conference] . . . were the Albanians, Armenians, Bosnians, Coreans, Georgians, and Herzegovinians . . . and individual appeals were received from Boers, Egyptians, and Irishmen.” 19 The noticeable similarities between the “oppressed nationalities of the world” at the beginning of the twentieth century and also the beginning of the twenty-first century convince me that it remains worthwhile to examine how the international arena of 1907 disqualified certain groups from membership and made them legally dependent on those that did belong. This process is, in a word, the focus of this book. This historical discourse, defining some nations as legal subjects and others as their objects of control, became entwined with the development of global empire. As discourses do, this one worked recursively to confirm itself. Moreover, this discourse upheld imperialist politics as legitimate practice and, in doing so, advanced the expansion of empire. Although it would be a mistake to say that the international terms of enlightened exploitation made nations imperialist, these terms did legitimate imperialist policies as legal. In the age of empire, the nations that defined the language of international relations—and only those nations—were its legal subjects. All the other nations were relegated to legal obscurity. By way of introducing the environment surrounding Japan’s engagement with this discourse of power, this chapter examines world reaction to the failed Korean protest at The Hague. As this historical moment makes clear, the legal erasure of a country and its people could be made legitimate in a relatively open fashion. Beginning in the 1950s with historian Hilary Conroy, American, Japanese, and Korean scholars have described what is now known as “the Korean incident at The Hague” as it played out in official and unofficial channels.20 Although discussing some of the same materials Conroy and others have considered, my reading is unlike theirs in highlighting how the terms of enlightened exploitation had become mundane by the time the Koreans sought to enter the international arena. This international discourse effectively prevented the Koreans from registering their nation as a legal subject, and, through the circular nature of these terms, the Koreans’ attempt at legitimacy only reinforced the judgment of Korea as illegitimate. Looking at the event this way illustrates how it was legal for the world to declare Korea illegal, thus pro-
Illegal Korea
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viding a deeper understanding of what power meant at a given time and place and how it operated. JAPAN ON DISPLAY
In August 1898, Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II expressed a desire for the “Powers” (as the world’s colonizing nations called themselves collectively at the time) to hold large-scale arms-reduction talks. The conference’s sponsors chose The Hague as their venue, and the world’s first self-proclaimed International Conference on Peace opened on 18 May the following year.21 The Russian government decided that only countries with diplomatic representatives in St. Petersburg could attend the conference, thus from the outset limiting participation to states classified as independent and sovereign by international law. In his assessment of the conference several years later, William Hull pointed out that from the start the tsar made random exceptions: “This general rule was not observed, however, in some notable instances, both in extending the invitation to some powers not represented at the Russian Court (for example, Luxemburg, Montenegro, and Siam), and in withholding it from some others which were so represented (for example, the South African Republic). The Russian government did not offer any official statement of the reasons for its inclusions and exclusions.” 22 The arbitrary nature of the invitation process is significant. From its founding moments, the organizers of a conference that was a forerunner of today’s United Nations made choices that represented de facto the legitimacy and illegitimacy of certain regimes. No other body rivaled The Hague group’s powerful claim to decide international policy, and its decisions were legal because no alternate court existed. If any nation lesser than one of the “Powers” tried to call a decision into question, it would only define that regime as illegal or—in today’s parlance—as a “rogue” or “outlaw” state. While the delegates to the 1899 conference congratulated themselves over the state of civilization, issued platitudes about peace, and motioned for another meeting, the Boer War and Japan’s war with Russia got in the way of their proceedings and forced the participants to postpone the Second International Conference on Peace until June 1907. The list of delegates attending the second meeting updated the roster of the world’s legal nations and set new limits on the international arena. There were twenty parties from Europe and nineteen from the Americas. Persia, Siam, China, and Japan comprised Asia.
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Japan’s Colonization of Korea
Apparently, no legal nation existed in Africa, a decision confirmed by the group’s refusal of the envoy from Egypt. In 1899, representatives had gathered at a small royal palace on the outskirts of the city, but in 1907 organizers felt they needed a larger building, both for the increased number of delegates and the grander expectations of the meeting itself. As the president of the conference, Alexander Nelidoff, proclaimed, “All friends of civilization are following with sympathetic interest,” the meeting opened in an austere, thirteenth-century hunting lodge, the aristocratic Ridderzaal (Hall of Knights).23 Jonkheer van Tets, the Dutch foreign minister, told a reporter that “the hall seemed to us to be worthy to receive the Second Peace Conference,” and an editorial in the Times of London called the conference “a contemporary Areopagus,” referring to the ancient Athenian council. 24 Van Tets also suggested that the building would “acquire a fresh historical fame which will exceed the limits of [its] national history now that within its walls the most completely representative assembly of countries in the world . . . will have been deliberated.” 25 The meeting’s promoters assumed that the authority of their actions made their endeavors legitimate, and on the conference’s opening day, an article in the Times described the scene: [The Ridderzaal], the meeting place of the Conference, dates from the 13th century and was built by William II, Count of Holland and King of the Romans. It is a long, high-roofed edifice and resembles a church with its two round towers flanking the principal entrance. The interior is imposing by reason of height and simplicity. The massive crossed beams that support the roof are of unpolished wood, and the only decoration of the whitewashed walls consists in the arms of the different States of the Netherlands emblazoned on the stone supports of the roofing. The floor of the hall is fitted throughout with desks and benches covered with green velvet. 26 Comparing the structure to a church gave a higher moral foundation to the convention. Plush benches dissected the holy space and mapped out the hierarchy of national delegates. As at the first conference, the common language was French, and nations were listed alphabetically by their French names. Hull noted that even “the alphabet favored the large powers by bringing their delegates to the front . . . the Germans, Americans, and British occupied the first row of seats—still in alphabetical order.” 27 By July, coal magnate Andrew Carnegie was so pleased with what he was reading in the papers and hearing
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from friends that he gave the Dutch government one-and-a-quarter million dollars to construct a new and permanent building for future meetings.28 Japanese delegates came daily to the Hall of Knights, resplendent in their morning coats and top hats, and participating as subjects in international law. The Korean envoys, on the other hand, even in their suits, could not exist in the same space, and their protest does not appear in the official proceedings.29 This moment is crucial to understanding how the erasure of Korea took effect. No judge at The Hague sat behind a bench to try a case called “the legality of Korea.” But then again, no judge had tried the infamous country-swapping cases two years earlier: the Taft-Katsura meeting (July 1905), in which the United States and Japan traded the Philippines for Korea; and the Second Anglo-Japan Alliance (August 1905), in which Japan and England exchanged Korea for India and Burma.30 The delegates who determined the survival of Korea officially represented their governments, but the authority they summoned to erase Korea transcended national levels and rested with the presumed power of international law. When the Korean delegates tried to make their appeal in the summer of 1907, the faceless judge of this higher authority no longer recognized the existence of their country. The law’s earthly representatives—the “knights” at The Hague—ignored the Korean plea, and they made their decision a legal determination. Journalists from countries whose delegates sat at the front of the conference sensationalized the Korean mission and in general agreed with their nation’s representatives about the nonviability of Korea. Their dispatches worked to further inscribe the legitimacy of The Hague delegates’ determination about Korea vis-à-vis Japan for readers around the world. The news generated constant publicity about the conference itself, ensuring the “historic fame” its leaders craved.31 Both the press coverage of the Korean envoys’ attempted entry to the conference and Japan’s reaction reveals how commonplace the discourse of enlightened exploitation had become. The tonal similarity of newspaper articles throughout the so-called civilized world demonstrates that a specific discourse had arisen with the development of knowledge about colonization. David Spurr has described this as a “series of colonial discourses marked by internal repetition, but not by allencompassing totality.” 32 The notion of “internal repetition” usefully explains how, for example, newspapers around the world printed articles that communicated the justness of Japan’s control of Korea, a topic that had little concerned them before. A rhetoric of social Darwinism permeated news stories
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Japan’s Colonization of Korea
throughout Europe and the United States and sustained the racially driven credo preached by champions of enlightened exploitation: a vigorous people legitimately controlled a stagnant one. Only Russian newspapers condemned the Japanese government’s handling of the Korean secret mission; as mentioned above, this was not surprising in light of lingering animosities from the countries’ recent war to gain control of Korea.33 In newspapers in London, New York, Paris, Frankfurt, and Shanghai, the discourse of enlightened exploitation colored descriptions of the Korean ruler, the Korean people, and how Koreans contrasted with Japanese. In this era of purposeful progress, Emperor Kojong was, for example, “an Oriental despot of the weaker type.” 34 Korea was “amongst the most antiquated of Oriental States a by-word for immovable and unreasonable conservatism.” 35 In London, the Korean emperor was seen as a “backward Sovereign,” “foolish,” and “fatuous.” 36 In Paris, he was “a sovereign out of an operetta . . . incapable of initiative, energy, [or] will.” 37 After the Japanese secured Kojong’s abdication, the New York Times condescended, “Upon the whole, the poor man is in a less pitiable state now.” 38 A report from Frankfurt declared that the new emperor had “a character as tractable as India rubber.” 39 A Frenchman confirmed this view: “[Sunjong] used to follow his father about like a dog, never showed the slightest energy or initiative.” 40 In the racial typology underpinning the category of “Oriental despot,” reporters defined the Korean people as one with their sovereign. An editorial in Paris’s Le Temps declared that the “passivity of the Korean people” rendered them “incapable of all sustained exertion, of all methodical activity.” 41 Even in an article somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the Koreans, their primary defect—according to world opinion—surfaced: “There is, to be sure, much evidence to show that the Koreans, at least the ruling caste, are incapable of carrying on a civilized government.” 42 The vocabulary used in the New York Tribune was clearest of all: “The Law of survival of the fittest prevails among states as well as among plants and animals. Corea has been conspicuously unfit.” 43 The decision by The Hague delegates to deny the Koreans a voice at the peace conference proved sufficient for the journalists, who described Korea as a nation Japan should control. Reporters at once explained and confirmed the common understanding of this determination. In the logic of the survival of the fittest, Japan’s control of Korea was “nothing else than the . . . dominance of a people incredibly clever and strenuous over one which has never stirred out of the sloth of ages.” 44 Informed assumptions about colonizer and colonized were manifest in comparisons of the Koreans and the Japanese. These
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descriptions placed Japan alongside European countries as a colonizing nation. In light of Korea’s past, Le Temps praised, “All travelers and those knowledgeable about Korea are amazed at what has been accomplished in the country since the Japanese established themselves there.” 45 A German newspaper held “a benevolent admiration for the imperturbable decision with which Japan [was] asserting her treaty rights.” 46 In a somewhat cynical, yet revealing, comment, the New York Times wrote, “Ito may say of Korea what Metternich boasted of Italy, that he has reduced it to a ’geographical expression.’” 47 An English-language paper in Shanghai echoed these sentiments: “In the best interests of the world at large such nations [Korea] had better be wiped off the map, and we do not blame Japan for wiping Korea off the map.” 48 Perhaps Britain’s extensive treaty connections with the Japanese government encouraged the Times to express the fullest esteem for Japan’s actions, affirming that Japan’s “reputation as a colonizing Power [was] at stake.” 49 Popular international approval for Japan’s increasing control over Korea demonstrates that, by 1907, Meiji leaders had won support for their policies in Korea, legitimating the ongoing process of “wiping Korea off the map.” The major Japanese newspapers chronicled The Hague affair largely by echoing the international press and government decrees.50 A few editorials elaborated on Japan’s actions as a legal matter, such as Nakamura Shinichi’s pedantic explanation of how Japan’s Korea policy fit into the international system of protectorate arrangements.51 And although most of Japan’s domestic press followed events such as Kojong’s forced abdication with studious understatement, one paper refused to toe the party line and ridiculed the entire affair. In a series of cartoons printed between 18 July and 3 August 1907, the Yorozu Chöhö portrayed what it saw as the absurdity of the Japanese government’s efforts to control its “reputation as colonizing Power.” 52 Kuroiwa Ruikö, the editor of the paper, was known not so much for consistent political views as for being categorically anti-elitist, and the drawings in his paper reflect this by lampooning the self-declared altruism of the international political order and Japan’s desire to exist as a subject in that order.53 The paper’s cartoonists depicted Japan’s hypocrisy in wanting to be a member of a group that justified the superiority of nations in ways that would—if pushed— exclude Japan from membership.54 The first cartoon in the series (Fig. 1) shows Japanese Resident General Itö Hirobumi dressed in a kimono, like an old woman, and chasing after a ragged Korean man. The Korean figure, drawn with the body of a small child and wearing no shoes, might represent either the emperor or one of the envoys
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sent to The Hague.55 Itö Hirobumi (1841–1909), the “George Washington of Japan,” was one of the chief architects of the Meiji government and arguably the most powerful politician of the era. The cartoonist nonetheless saw him and his pretensions as ridiculous. As the kimono-clad Itö chases the diminutive Korean, the Korean runs to four tall men in suits (Euro-Americans), standing in the background and laughing. The caption chastises, “Grandma isn’t too smart letting you out looking so shabby!” In another drawing, Itö and Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Gonosuke sit behind the wheel of a roadster and drive over dogs labeled Kan and Min (the “Korean people”). In yet another cartoon, the former emperor of Korea acts as a puppet-master, manipulating strings attached to his son, the new emperor. The final drawing in the series features a handsome, young Japanese man dressed in a formal kimono and an imported hat, standing next to a pretty, smiling Korean woman (perhaps his wife) who wears the native Korean hanbok and demurely nods toward the man. Their newborn baby (whose gender is not identified) is securely in the man’s arms, and the words Shin Kyöyaku (“New Agreement”) run down its back, referring to the July 1907 accord giving Japan control of Korea’s domestic laws. To the side stands a tall Russian naval officer, hands trembling and sweat beading on his face, as he observes the moment. The caption reads, “When this happens, absolutely nothing can be done.” The colonizer radiates a stereotypical masculine dominance, while the colonized shows only feminine compliance. The youthful couple and the product of their union contrast sharply with the teetering Russian, pointing
FIGURE 1.
A cartoon from Yorozu Chöhö, 18 July 1907
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to how the times have changed and the dynamics and locus of power have shifted. Despite the biting satirical nature of this series of cartoons, it is critical to understand that they and their creators—similar to the Korean secret envoys to The Hague—tried to tell a story that was “unthinkable” to most Japanese. In contrast, pictures such as the one featured on this book’s cover described the “thinkable” story of the day. By the time the Yorozu Chöhö cartoonists criticized the underlying assumptions of Japan’s new international relations, many Japanese had come to believe fervently that their country had already become or was about to become a powerful imperialist nation, deserving of its status. Popular woodblock prints, such as Kobayashi Kiyochika’s depiction of the Japanese army bombarding the Chinese at Pyongyang in 1894 (featured on this book’s jacket), appeared widely in Japanese newspapers around the turn of the century. Often, they were sold separately, sometimes with print runs exceeding 100,000 copies.56 Pictures such as these recounted to Japanese throughout the country the enormously popular story of Japan’s growing international success, a story that unwittingly fueled moments such as the widespread protests in Japan following the country’s victory over Russia. The Hibiya Riots, as they are collectively known, arose first in the fall of 1905 in downtown Tokyo when the terms of Japan’s peace settlement with Russia became public. Not satisfied with mere protectorate rights over Korea, tens of thousands took to the streets to clamor for more war prizes for Japan. Many felt they had sacrificed their own lives and the lives of relatives to win what proved to be a terribly costly war in terms of domestic resources and casualties (a belief repeatedly reinforced in woodblock war prints).57 Protests against what were seen as the paltry spoils spread throughout major cities in Japan. Police arrested more than two thousand demonstrators in Tokyo alone, where at least seventeen died in the rioting. It is important for our discussion to understand that the Hibiya protesters were not angry that Japan wanted to participate as a subject in the international arena, nor were they upset that Japan wanted to control Korea. They were angry because, while the price of rice skyrocketed at home, their government was not winning a larger share of international status, which was to them the “thinkable” outcome.58 As a result, Japan’s increased concessions over Korea during the summer of 1907—the “New Agreement”—seemed to many a matter of course, if not belatedly gained or granted. In the immediate aftermath of The Hague affair in 1907, the Japanese government formally took charge of defining its Korean policies to the world
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community in what can only be described as the self-conscious language of colonial power. The Japanese colonial regime in Seoul decided to begin publishing English-language reports detailing its Korean policies. By having printed explanations ready, Japan sought to avoid being unprepared when foreigners asked questions about its policies in Korea. With these reports, Japan set the terms for any discussion of its policies in Korea that might arise, enabling the Japanese government to control some of the uncertainty that attended journalistic inquiry. For example, following quickly on the Korean mission to The Hague, “His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s Residency General” (or “H.I.J.M’s. R.G.”), as Itö called himself in English, published the first copy of the Annual Report for 1907 on Reforms and Progress in Korea. The project was so successful from the start that it was pursued annually until the collapse of the Japanese empire in 1945.59 Although many scholars have read through these annual reports for statistical information, they have downplayed the historical value of the texts themselves because of what they view as their propagandist nature. The propaganda aspect of the Report, however, offers the key to understanding how Japan’s official narration of its Korean policies meshed with other nations’ colonial discourses, both official and unofficial. For example, the Japanese government relied on formats to describe its policies that the British used in India and that the French used in Algeria, and the Report’s authors established a congruence of meaning for Japan’s colonial policy in Korea through the use of similar terms. The Report flaunted Japan’s efforts in Korea as a wholly civilizing endeavor, a mission civilisastrice. One of the compilers of the 1907 Report was a young bureaucrat named Hishida Seiji. Hishida began working at the Japanese Foreign Ministry shortly after receiving his doctorate in political science in 1905 from Columbia University, where his advisor, the famous international law scholar John Bassett Moore, recommended his dissertation for publication.60 Hishida had thus learned the terminology of great-power politics from one of its leading theorists, and he and those who worked with him in compiling the Report for Itö detailed Japan’s relations with Korea for a like-minded—or at least a similarly educated—audience. The Japanese government sent complimentary copies of these reports to governments whose representatives participated in The Hague conference, as well as to major university libraries in some of those countries.61 According to the Report, the Japanese administrators in Seoul sought only to enlighten the Korean people. The 1907 Report (distributed in early 1908), for example, narrated the pains to which Japan had
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gone to try to make Korea stand on its own in the international arena: “With the hope of making Korea’s independence a reality, Japan employed all the resources of friendly suggestion to induce the former to adopt modern civilized methods. . . . In consequence, however, of jealousy between political parties, nothing resulted but plots and counterplots.” 62 The Report made clear—to an audience familiar with the Koreans’ “unthinkable” behavior at The Hague just months earlier—that the Koreans were unfit to rule themselves and therefore could not participate as subjects in international terms: “[After 1905] Japan had now realized that Korea was not capable of governing herself, and that the policy of maintaining her independence could not be pursued without making certain modifications. . . . Thus Japan took the responsibility of intervention in Korean affairs, after having given the Koreans ample opportunity to prove their fitness for self-government, and after having found them wholly unprepared for the task.”63 It is not difficult to discern the self-aggrandizing aspect of the narrative, but it is crucial to understand that, in applying this aspect, the definers of Japan’s enlightened exploitation integrated Japan’s relations with Korea into a larger international practice. Within Japan, the government opted for an even showier display of its increasing control over Korea. Between the winter of 1907 and the summer of 1910—approximately the interval between The Hague affair and the annexation—the Meiji government paraded the young Korean crown prince,Yi Yun, on well-chaperoned tours of Japan.64 The planning for this visit, as well as the press coverage of his travels, underscores the confidence with which Japan calculated the international and domestic approval of its erasure of Korea. In early August 1907, only days after the Japanese government forced the Korean emperor to abdicate in favor of his son, Resident General Itö announced that he would take the new emperor’s ten-year-old brother, Yi Yun, to Japan to educate him in an “enlightened manner.” 65 Itö’s plan went forward against the strenuous objection of the boy’s mother and various Korean court officials. On 5 December 1907, an entourage including Itö, the prince, two Korean court-appointed teachers, retainers, and guards set sail from Incheon to Shimonoseki. Several months prior to the Korean prince’s departure for Japan, the Japanese crown prince (the future emperor Taishö) had visited Korea himself, and so Japanese newspaper readers had grown accustomed to following such tours. Unlike the Japanese prince’s visit to Korea, however, neither the Korean prince nor his guardians wanted to go to Japan, a point most Japanese never knew.
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In the case of Yi Yun, Japan’s actions certainly could be described as a form of kidnapping. What is more interesting, though, is the extent to which the Japanese government did not hide its actions, but rather displayed its prize. By educating the boy in Japan in an “enlightened manner,” the Meiji regime sought to generate domestic and international commentary on its relations with Korea. Two weeks after leaving Korea, the prince and his entourage arrived at Tokyo’s Shimbashi Station to great fanfare.66 With the Japanese crown prince at the head of the line, hundreds of well-wishers, including members of the Japanese imperial court’s council, cabinet dignitaries, and school groups, as well as countless passersby, heralded the boy’s arrival. The significance of this event cannot be overstated. After centuries of Chinese dominance in East Asia—a region whose source of knowledge was located in the Chinese emperor’s residence—for the first time Japan claimed the privilege of instructing a continental prince in an “enlightened manner.” The era of colonizing politics did not inaugurate the practice of capturing foreign princes for political ends, but, in the discursive practices of enlightened exploitation, educating a foreigner of royal blood in the colonizer’s capital city defined and sustained notions about higher levels of civilization vis-à-vis the visitor’s homeland.67 At this point, the Japanese government seized its advantage. Japanese leaders from the imperial couple down through the ranks of local government employees manipulated the boy’s seemingly innocent presence to anthropomorphize Japanese-Korean relations for the benefit of spectators and newspaper readers throughout Japan. What could have been better material to work with than a barely adolescent boy with regal manners who spoke only a few sentences of imperially inflected Japanese? Following the formula concocted by Meiji statesmen in the 1870s to explain the then-new Japanese emperor’s political existence to his unaware subjects, between 1908 and 1910 the Japanese government organized lavish tours throughout Japan for Yi Yun. Also following earlier practice, Japanese taxpayers footed the bill for the Korean prince’s travels throughout Hokkaido, Aomori, Akita, Sendai, Morioka, Fukushima, Kansai, and the San-in Coast. Apparently Yi Yun and his guides enjoyed some places so much that his hosts took him two and even three times. Historian Takashi Fujitani has explained that the Meiji emperor’s tours in the 1870s served to “bring the emperor down from a godly presence ‘above the clouds’ in Kyoto to become an active and visible agent in politics.” 68 In 1908, the Japanese government did not need to bring the Korean prince down to earth, as it were, but it similarly needed to
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integrate him—on behalf of his country—into the realm of politics as usual for Japan, a politics that increasingly meant Korea as part of Japan. At each stop on Yi Yun’s tours, local officials constructed elaborate welcome arches with Japanese and Korean flags and orchestrated their townspeople into cheers of “banzai,” dances, and military drills in his honor. Although the process of introducing the prince followed the same methods as those used to introduce the young Japanese emperor in the 1870s, local dignitaries and newspaper reporters added an important new component to the mix. The Korean prince, they emphasized, had come to Japan to obtain an education similar to what all subjects of a rapidly “enlightening” Japan were by then privileged to receive.69 Riding the still-surging patriotic waves that followed Japan’s victory over Russia, the Meiji government proudly displayed its control of Korea. The Japanese people who gathered at train stations from Nemuro to Matsue to Nagoya may have known little, if anything, of the Korean mission to The Hague, who Sunjong or Kojong was, or how this boy Yi Yun fit into the puzzle. Even if they did, they might not have cared. As the subjects of Japan welcomed the Korean prince into their neighborhoods, his presence defined and confirmed what local and national officials and journalists were publicizing: their country stood higher on the chain of enlightenment than the boy’s native land. The Japanese government did not plot Yi Yun’s tours as a covert means to justify the official colonization of Korea two years later. It did not have to. The descriptive reactions to the boy’s well-publicized visits solidified into the fact of annexation when it finally took place. As Japanese leaders and newspaper reporters emphasized, Japan had come so far internationally that now foreign royalty came to Japan for enlightenment. During the first few years of the twentieth century, in the self-legitimated taxonomy of the world’s colonizing powers, Korea increasingly ranked as a dependent regime. In what we might productively reconsider as a colonial war, akin to numerous such wars around the world at the time, Japan defeated Russia and won Korea. In 1906, the United States recognized Japan’s victory spoils by deleting “Korea” in the U.S. government’s Record of Foreign Relations and placing it under the category of “Japan.” The change inscribed a shift in political relations that neatly fit into national erasures occurring around the world at the time, such as those in Hawai‘i, New Zealand, and Vietnam. In July 1907, frustrated by their nonreception at The Hague, the Korean envoys set sail for America, hoping to register a formal protest against Japan and plead their case in Washington, D.C.—a place many believed defined the meaning of independence at the time. When news of the Koreans’ departure from London
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reached U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root, he resolved that the men would not be received in any official capacity either in Washington, D.C., or in Oyster Bay, where President Roosevelt was spending his summer vacation. The United States, declared Root, “formally recognized the Japanese control of the foreign relations of Korea.” 70 Analyzing the colonial discourse surrounding Japan’s annexation of Korea allows for a new approach to Japan’s engagement in the politics of the Great Game. The following chapters give prominence to an intellectual history of international relations by examining how and when powerful terms of state interaction began to encircle the globe within a reflexive political discourse. To some, an exploration of such terms may seem excessively detailed, and to others it may seem coldly inconsiderate of human suffering, but this discussion is more than an academic exercise. Common understandings of this era in Japanese studies have long relied on theories of imperialism whose composition ignores the Japanese empire.71 Many analyses, for example, trace a century of imperialist historiography by beginning with J. A. Hobson’s famous 1902 treatise, Imperialism, never recognizing that the Japanese anarchist Kötoku Shüsui predated Hobson by a year with his own scathing condemnation of colonizing politics, entitled Imperialism: Monstrosity of the Twentieth Century.72 Comparativists and scholars of Japan alike tend to plug Japan into studies of Euro-American colonial projects, measuring Japan’s performance against them in some way. Japan was “late.” Japan was “similar” or “different.” Language difficulties exist to be sure, but they exist for the Japanese scholar as well. A far deeper problem persists. Historical theories of international relations sustain the Euro-American Powers and their former colonies as the standards by which historical pasts and presents are defined. By neglecting Japan in these formulations, the civilizational project endures. Only the nations first described as civilized manifest a normal history of imperialism.73 Another related problem arises in trying to fit Japan squarely into such existing imperialism studies. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japan did not come close to the national strength of the “Powers,” according to what many historians since Marx—sympathetic and not—have valued as indicators necessary for imperial conquest.74 Further complicating this problem, historians of Japan’s imperialist development have divided themselves into fairly entrenched political camps according to whether they agree with or are critical of Lenin’s understanding of imperialism. Because the numbers in Japan’s case do not easily concur with Lenin’s determination of imperialism as the
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highest stage of capitalism, scholars from one school of thought have tried to massage official economic statistics in order to amplify their critiques within a larger, Marxist frame of explanation.75 Conversely, other historians who are dismissive of Marx—and also, vehemently, of Lenin—tend to revel in official statistics to discount these ideas as wrong-headed, proving that Japan’s imperialist efforts were “political” and not “economic” in origin.76 Now, at the beginning of a new century, the first group’s line of reasoning feels hackneyed and defeated, while the latter group teeters close to apologism: Japan just did what everyone else was doing. Japan’s imperialist projects were political, but imperialist politics were not discrete from economic endeavors. Reasoning otherwise now works only to privilege twentieth-century Japan as a perennial victim of the times. To describe, for example, Minister of Finance Shibusawa Eiichi’s Meiji industrialization plans as “economic” without connecting these plans to the Japanese empire’s growth, or to remember Itö’s restructuring of Japan into an internationally recognized sovereign state as “political” without acknowledging its economic dimensions, fails to acknowledge the interdependence of these actions. Moreover, separating this history as either economic or political— rather than insisting on both dimensions—encourages contemporary Japanese governments to continue to avoid responsibility for Japan’s twentieth century. This history, of course, includes the forcible removal of millions from Korea, China, and elsewhere to work in factories and sex camps throughout Japan’s empire. Yet the government of Japan can officially maintain that Japan’s empire was politically necessary, and not based on economic considerations; therefore, it maintains that it owes no compensation to its victims. Ironically, scholars overlooking the historical nature of international terms as useful tools for analyzing Japan’s empire risk not only sustaining a sense of the transcendent value of the terms but also reiterate ideologies that once condoned Japan’s expansionistic policies. For example, the legal expression “propinquity”—used by the United States government in the early twentieth century to sanction Japan’s colonial involvement on the Asian continent—has been recycled into the enduring historiographic explanation of the difference between Japanese imperialism and other nations’ imperialist pasts.77 The “Japan-as-different-from-the-norm” approach argues that “as the only nonWestern imperium of recent times, the Japanese colonial empire stands as an anomaly of modern history. . . . To maximize its strength, the effort to assert its presence in Asia—the creation of empire—would have to begin with the domination over neighboring areas close to home.” 78 For many historians,
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this worldview—the “thinkable” story within the field—has defined modern history as Western history, and Japan’s past is seen as an aberration within the expected flow of the linear chronology of modern history. In this book, I attempt to step around this line of reasoning by not presuming that Japan’s colonizing past was a strange occurrence on a predetermined timeline. Japan’s engagement in international terms demonstrates instead how the politics of enlightened exploitation germinated globally in capitalist modernity and how its forms endure. Meiji political theorist Nakae Chömin’s famous treatise, A Discourse on Government by Three Drunkards (1887), provides a fitting segue into the chapters that follow.79 The book’s protagonist, Professor Nankai, holds great faith in the promise of Japan’s new place in the international community. In his customary besotted state, he expounds on the possibilities of this world: “Despite the power of survival of the fittest . . . all more or less recognize international law. . . . Moreover, [the four Powers’] duty in maintaining the balance among nations and their agreement to uphold international law secretly binds their limbs.” 80 Throughout the Discourse, Nankai describes a social Darwinist world of nations. Despite the intersection of this political theory with the workings of international law, Nankai (and arguably his creator) holds faith in the value of these terms to constrain such voracious appetites, concluding that international law would prevent “smaller nations from being annexed.” 81 In practice, however, Japan’s engagement with international law afforded the opposite result. As Japan engaged the terms of international law in describing its policies towards Korea, Meiji diplomats and legal theorists forged a legitimated path to the annexation of Korea in 1910.
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CHAPTER 2
INTERNATIONAL TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT
I nternational terms won the twentieth century. Terms such as independence and sovereignty became the means of discursive exchange in markets and parliaments around the world, but their everyday usage has obscured the historical process that made them the vocabulary of modern international relations. Use of these terms has simply become common sense. The new, post–9/11 U.S. doctrine of “preemptive strike” introduces still-unmeasured dimensions to these terms; yet at the end of the twentieth century, the whole body of international terms was heralded as “the constitution of mankind,” upheld by many as an ideal and untouchable form.1 Disparate political interests, including the member states of the International Monetary Fund, North Korea’s reclusive leader Kim Jong-il, and U.S. militia leaders (who incite fear of the United Nations), all speak in terms of the “sovereignty” of their own “independent” nations. Recent self-determination movements in East Timor and Kosovo defined their wars using these terms—which are the same terms their oppressor regimes used to constitute themselves—further attesting to the power of these expressions. In the late nineteenth century, the young Meiji government engaged Japan in international terms, a decision that stands to this day as one of the most significant changes in Japanese modern history. In a short period of time, Japanese officials determined to establish their newly reorganized nation in the terms of international law, thus relocating Japan’s place in the world and redefining power in Asia. These terms became Japan’s new legal discourse of power. As aggrandizers of the Japanese empire described their policies in this 27
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discourse, they legitimated their nation’s imperialist expansion. As they did so, the vocabulary they used became the prevailing political terminology used throughout Asia. It is important to bear in mind that the terms themselves did not make Japan imperialist. Rather, Japanese policymakers used the terms to describe their early-twentieth-century empire as legitimate. At the time, throughout the world, leaders of colonizing nations used international terms to describe their countries’ imperialist expansions as legitimate, and the vocabulary they used became legal precedent. The terms of international law were, therefore, part and parcel of the terms of colonialism, and their global use at the beginning of the twentieth century embedded them as the dominant, discursive form in international relations at the time. In the 1850s, American and European warships began to arrive off Japan’s coastline. The Western method of opening Japan to commerce was to threaten war against the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) should it refuse to sign trade treaties.2 The documents that representatives of these nations brought with them were written in the vocabulary of international law, peppered with terms such as sovereignty and independence. A number of Tokugawa ministers, as well as their rivals, signed such papers without fully understanding the scope of their contents. What was most remarkable about this episode—as will be detailed later in this chapter—was the ability of Japanese officials to negotiate with the socalled barbarians, in light of nearly 250 years of self-imposed isolation from foreigners that had existed under Tokugawa rule. The United States government had not prepared its demands in Japanese or even Chinese. Rather, these exchanges were made possible through the efforts of generations of Tokugawa-era scholars, who undertook linguistic studies based on their fascination with words. These scholars often worked in secret when the government deemed their scholarship heretical. The work of these wordsmiths enabled the initial negotiations with the barbarians, but more importantly it led to the transformative, Meiji-era outcome of making the new discourse of international relations meaningful in Japanese. Because these scholars’ work made it possible to translate international terms into Japanese, Meiji leaders made informed decisions about engaging Japan in the “civilized arena” of the early twentieth century. Writing international law into Japanese represents more than a reactionary response to prevent Japan itself from being colonized. The terms of international law embodied a pivotal element—a larger method of creating inter-
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national order. Meiji political and legal theorists recognized in these terms a means by which Japan could engage in the power politics of the day. By definition, international law is a performative discourse in which representatives, acting at the behest of sovereign states, negotiate with similarly entitled foreign envoys. In this relationship, the representatives mutually define one another in a politics of display. At the turn of the nineteenth century, international law classified the world in terms of “completely sovereign and independent” countries and places where sovereignty was “limited and qualified.” 3 The “limited and qualified” regimes were, therefore, definitionally dependent in some way on alien regimes for their own identities. Responding to what the world’s self-defined Powers proclaimed to be a universal means of exchange, Japanese state strategists resolved to use these forms. By the turn of the twentieth century, this decision created a perception among the “civilized” world that Japan was the modern, legal nation in Asia. As the modern international system developed, international terms fed on and were fed by theories of the nation-state. Although international law presumed to transcend national distinctions with universalist claims, only governments that successfully subscribed to nation-state theories could participate. Carol Gluck’s benchmark analysis of Meiji Japan richly demonstrates how Meiji officials reshaped the country in keeping with the substance and style of a modern nation.4 As a matter of course, Meiji officials and their advisors refashioned Japan according to a broader discourse of power among nations. By examining how Japan engaged in these terms, we can deepen our understanding of the reflexivity of the modern form of nation building.Viewing the Meiji effort in an international context recalls various assumptions and limits of the nation writ large, as well as highlighting some present-day legacies. Late-nineteenth-century theorists of the nation-state created what Prasenjit Duara calls “regime[s] of authenticity,” which were fashioned by statebuilders who “invoked various representations of authoritative inviolability.”5 International terms afforded such immutable authority. Claims to national existence in one country mirrored similar claims in other countries; in conjunction they created an “authentic regime.”6 Only governments that described themselves in modernity’s terms fit into the workings of international law, and Japan’s decision to define itself within this discourse enabled the Meiji government to participate as a subject. In his 1875 Outline of the Theory of Civilization, for example, the famous Meiji-era enlightenment thinker, Fukuzawa Yukichi, repeatedly urged Japanese leaders to label the country
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“independent” in order to participate as a civilized state in the enlightened world.7 At the same time, individual voices and groups that challenged the assumptions of such governments—like the Korean envoys to The Hague in 1907—found hope in international terms, but they were often rendered powerless from voicing what the “authentic regimes” judged as inauthentic claims. In other words, only the era’s “thinkable” participants counted as “authentic” in international law. So-called universalist ideas—including the concept of a sovereign state acting independently—were historically generated within the emerging dynamic of capitalist political economics. The vocabulary of international law could not be separated from the material conditions of industrializing capitalism. Nor, for that matter, were its terms meant to be distinct from such conditions. These terms, like others generated within this dynamic, rendered the conditions of the capitalist social order normative and legal, and Meiji internationalists made the terms commonplace in Japanese. In any discussion of historical change from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan, it is critical to remember that Japan’s Tokugawa economy prepared the way for Meiji entrepreneurs to capitalize quickly on the postrevolutionary era’s newly available commodities of labor and materials.8 At the same time, it is equally vital to grasp that the process of industrialization tore apart and refashioned all social relations (and still does) whenever and wherever it occurred.9 The Meiji government’s famous decision to erase prior social categories by outlawing distinctions between “high” and “low” generated the legal underpinnings for the creation of a new mass of Japanese subjects, who comprised, in Marx’s phrasing, the “free, unprotected, and rightless” labor that would propel Japan into the twentieth century.10 Marx’s words are worth noting here. In Capital, written the same year that the Meiji government came to power (1868), Marx’s critique of the social conditions surrounding him is replete with the terminology of “freedom” and “protection” that states increasingly relied on to describe the politics of imperialism as enlightened practice. The 1868 Meiji ishin (variously understood in English as a “revolution” or “restoration”) wove anew the terms of governance in Japan. The government’s engagement in international terms has proved as important in the long run as its creation of a mass military and an industrial fiscal policy. Americans and Europeans arriving in Japan demanded that the Tokugawa government “open” Japan to the world. They also insisted that Japan agree to do so by signing the documents of “amity and commerce” brought ashore by the Americans and
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Europeans. Students of European languages and technologies (known at the time as “Western studies scholars,” or yögakusha) investigated the meaning of the terms written in these texts and rendered Japanese expressions for words such as “independent.” Although the leading antigovernment forces decried the Tokugawa government’s diplomatic negotiations as treacherous—and despite their widespread slogan to “expel the barbarians,” at one of the first meetings of the antigovernment forces after the overthrow of the Tokugawa government—the new Meiji government declared its intention to conduct itself with all nations “according to international law.”11 Soon after claiming control of the government, the Meiji Council of State issued a series of instructions to the young emperor concerning relations with foreign countries. Led by former “Revere the Emperor–Expel the Barbarian” activist Sanjö Sanetomi, the council proclaimed its intent to “fix [its] eyes on the conditions of the times and avoid corrupt customs of the past.”12 The following month, ministers gathered in front of the emperor and swore to uphold five principles that the government’s financial planner, Yuri Kimimasa, and others drafted as the regime’s famous Charter Oath. Again, vowing to “break with the evil customs of the past, “ the officials proclaimed to accord their actions with the “just ways of the world” (tenchi no ködö), an expression that was just one of the phrases used to render “law of nations,” or “international law,” into Japanese.13 The founding principles of the Meiji government, therefore, not only negated the prior government’s practices, but also indicated that Japan would henceforth conduct foreign policy in terms that manifested the internal reordering of the country. For the architects of Meiji Japan, building the new nation-state necessarily meant creating one that would engage openly with the world in international terms. The profound shift from distrusting all things foreign to participating actively in the international system did not take place easily or without confusion. The preponderance in the new government of former retainers from Satsuma (a region in southern Japan) fostered an approach to policy that reflected an awareness of foreigners beyond the Asian world. In 1868, when the Satsuma men came to power, they knew firsthand that during the previous several hundred years, when the Tokugawa government sealed off Japan from much of the world, the concept of “foreign” had expanded well beyond a China-centered sphere to include in its practical meaning Europeans and New Worlders . Because of this, these leaders were disposed to build quickly on the efforts of generations of scholars from throughout the country who had long studied the far-flung aliens, thus
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enabling Japan to engage with the vocabulary of power dominant in a wider “foreign” arena of the time. An even more direct way of understanding the Meiji leaders’ conscious decision to engage Japan in international terms comes through knowing that the practical terms of this law were first introduced to the Chinese character world by China, but the Chinese chose not to reorder their policies by these terms.14 In 1862, bureaucrats at the Zongli Yamen—the office established by the Qing court to cope with the dramatic influx of Europeans and Americans to China—began to read parts of the prevailing text of practical international relations of the day, Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law. Wheaton, a scholar of government and law at Brown University, moved between academia and government service, working also as a young diplomat in Paris where he studied continental law firsthand. In 1863, the American minister to China, Anson Burlingame, decided to introduce a missionary friend of his, William Martin, to members of the Zongli Yamen because he knew that Martin had been working on a Chinese translation of Wheaton’s text. Martin, a Presbyterian missionary from Indiana, later wrote of this moment: “The Chinese ministers expressed much pleasure when I laid on the table my unfinished version of Wheaton, though they knew little of its nature or contents.” 15 Overall, there was slight interest in the book among the group of Qing officials who were on good terms with Americans and Europeans, but no one suggested using these different laws with their alien terms for relations with other Asian governments. As far as China was concerned, there was no need to redefine the terms of international relations within the region, because the long-standing formula sustained China at the apex.16 Rulers of countries of what is now East and Southeast Asia had long manipulated the influence of Chinese emperors. They either sent envoys to engage in subordinate exchanges with the Chinese leaders or, like the Tokugawa shogunate, actively degraded the emperors to elevate claims of their own rule. Early in the eighteenth century, the well-known example of shogunal advisor Arai Hakuseki’s concern for naming the shogun, vis-à-vis the Korean king, revealed a desire to place Japan on a par with China by purposefully avoiding reference to China.17 Nonetheless, whichever method of self-legitimation was performed, rulers in the region conducted written legal exchanges with other regimes through the common currency of mutually intelligible Chinese-character terms (kanji). Diplomatic agreements, which defined centuries of protocol between Japan’s Tokugawa-era and Korea’s Choso˘n-era rulers, derived meaning from a shared diplomatic discourse, because the terms ref-
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erenced a mutually comprehensible Chinese lexicon. Regardless of whether these contracts mentioned China, China’s intellectual authority in the region was manifested through the continued use of its legal terms, derived from continental practice. Moreover, when there were disagreements, translators or negotiators themselves could write out disputed points to make them clear. This practice was known as “brush-talking,” and the discourse of exchange relied on a shared comprehension and valuing of the continentally ordered terminology.18 In short, the regimes in this region had long legitimated themselves and their policies in a common form that ultimately sustained the dominant position of Chinese knowledge, because they all relied on Chinese terms for exchange.19 In face of these traditional methods of exchange, the Meiji regime’s conversion to international terms radically transformed the hierarchy of power within the region. Japanese officials wrested power away from the continent and became the definers of the new terms of exchange. This point may be illustrated by an example from a 1905 discussion of privileges that Japan wanted in Manchuria. Qing representatives, led by Yuan Shikai, expressed concern over the phrasing of a Japanese diplomatic note while meeting with Japanese envoys Komura Jutaro and Uchida Yasutoshi. According to the Japanese minutes of the conversation, Yuan asked for clarification of the term “protest” (kögi), a term that “was not usually used” in China.20 His interpreter, Tang, asked Uchida, “What is the meaning of kögi?” Uchida replied in English, “Protest.” In English, Tang replied, “Have you this word?” “Yes,” said Uchida. Tang inquired further, “Legally?” “Yes,” said Uchida. “Legally and diplomatically.” Tang responded, “We have not had it. This is a new word.” Returning to interpreted Japanese, another Chinese minister mused, “The British Ambassador Mr. Satow like this term.” Yuan Shikai added, “I learned this term from Mr. Satow.” The Japanese minister Komura interjected, “It puzzles me to learn that you do not like this term.” The minutes noted general laughter.21 Despite the recorded levity of the moment, the men’s conversation indicates a major historical shift. The Meiji emperor’s representatives demonstrated that the government of Japan was officially conducting foreign relations in terms that were new to the kanji world and fluent with the terms the Powers used; thus, they were not deferring to China’s long-held position in the region as definer of terms. Ultimately, the Meiji decision to reorder Japan’s foreign relations collapsed the distinction between contracting with kanji-educated and kanji-illiterate places. As early as 1798, Japanese political thinker and government advisor
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Honda Toshiaki bemoaned the impenetrability of his native tongue. “The vast number and inconvenience of kanji render them unusable in exchange with foreign countries,” he explained.22 At the time, Honda already saw a double order of diplomacy, with the kanji world discrete from the “foreign” world. Within a mere century, however, Japanese legal and political scholars had translated the terms of international law into Japanese, either by redefining extant kanji terms (e.g., hogo [to protect] into hogokoku [protectorate]) or by creating new terms (e.g., dokuritsu [independent]). They created a vocabulary that made sense when it was translated back into the European languages that originated the terms, and also ensured that Japan could name itself in the kanji region as the definer of knowledgeable practice with the modern world. Although Japanese leaders ranged from hot to cold in sentiments and policies toward Asia during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the doubletiered terms of diplomatic interaction disappeared, and Japan legally contracted with all nations according to a shared lexicon. Historians and literary scholars have long divided texts of Meiji international law texts into two categories: those that relied on the Chinese government’s initial efforts and those that did not.23 In the early 1930s in Japan, the desire to locate native origins in everything and anything encouraged literary critic Osatake Takeki to notice a particularly “Japanese theoretical stance” in one of the numerous books of international law consulted by the Meiji government.24 Despite the fact that the Meiji government had adopted a text by the scholar of Chinese studies Shigeno Yatsusugu, Osatake found “truer” understanding of what was at stake in Japanese sources, including, for example, linguistic scholar Uryü Mitora’s use of “ködö” (“official way”) over Shigeno’s choice of “köhö” (“international law”). These analyses highlight nuances among various schools of thought in the tempestuous atmosphere in which international terms became Japanese, as well as their historiographic legacy.25 Because the Meiji example of the interconnection of words and power is so tangible, my inquiry steps around a concern for origins and “true” meanings and focuses instead on how the terms were put into practice. Although the search for specific moments when thinkers finally translated certain words into Japanese may rectify the work of forgotten translators and scholars, approaching translation from such a perspective often leads to assertions of mistranslation. Furthermore, although analysis along such lines can yield compelling discussions of a particular language’s past, it runs the risk of doing battle with a universal language—a pre-Babellian ur-lexicon.26 The mistrans-
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lation approach assumes an eventual correct translation and can blot out the importance of the historical activity of preliminary attempts at new concepts. Therefore, I follow Pierre Bourdieu’s observation of the futility of trying to understand “the power of linguistic manifestation linguistically,” and instead I examine instead how international terms became what Bourdieu called “legitimate speech.” 27 There is an unfortunate and almost unyielding opinion that Japanese are simply copycats and have never invented anything of importance on their own. To imply even slightly, however, that those concerned with Meiji Japan’s place in the world copied only silhouettes of alien knowledge would fail to understand how Japanese thinkers and diplomats engaged the discourse of international terms as a form of power. Moreover, the view that Japanese only imitate modern political forms—and, according to this logic, never really understand them—entrenches the idea that the Europeans and Americans who invented such forms created them in a pure vacuum or along the lines of some Platonic good.28 From its inception, the encoders of international law in Europe and the United States defined it as a domain exclusively practiced by nations that had achieved a certain level of civilization. In the late eighteenth century, political theorists began reworking an accepted notion of jus gentium (the law of nations) into a measurable discipline of positive law. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham coined the term “international” to redefine the ideas of law and ambassadorial protocol previously theorized by earlier thinkers such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Puffendorf, and François de Callières: “The word international, it must be acknowledged, is a new one; though, it is hoped, sufficiently analogous and intelligible. It is calculated to express, in a more significant way, the branch of law which commonly goes under the name of the law of nations.” 29 Although many of its practitioners continued to use the expression “law of nations” along with “international law”—and many still do—Bentham designated a new phenomenon that was taking root at the time. He codified the intercourse among nations as a knowable and discrete science that could be studied, taught, and expanded on as a discipline, and he named international law as its attending terminology.30 Legal theorists conceived of the terms of international law in a discourse resonant with prevailing European and American theories of civilization, theories that named the independent nation-state as the perfect form of political achievement. In his 1836 tome—Elements of International Law: With a Sketch of the History of the Science, which ultimately formed the basis of international
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law in Asia—Wheaton asserted that “international law, as understood among civilized nations, may be defined as consisting of those rules of conduct which reason deduces, as consonant to justice, from the nature of the society existing among independent nations.” 31 Because Wheaton’s text wound up in Japanese translation and was used as one of the sources in drafting the Meiji government’s new foreign policy, it is worth noting how Wheaton himself described the importance of the law. Like most of his contemporaries, he did not presuppose a blank world, but rather emphasized how Christianity propelled the law and the civilization he espoused: “International law may therefore be considered a positive law. . . . The progress of civilization, founded on Christianity, has gradually conducted us to observe a law analogous to this in our intercourse with all nations of the globe, whatever may be their religious faith.” 32 Such awareness directed the presumed “we” in Wheaton’s thinking to write laws of international exchange that bespoke the inner meaning of “our” civilization’s progress.33 Although Wheaton acknowledged that non-Christians had forms of exchange, he believed that such heathens would remain uncivilized until “we” brought them civilization and converted them to its more perfect methods: “It may be remarked, in confirmation of this view, that the more recent intercourse between the Christian nations in Europe and America and the Mohammedan and Pagan nations of Asia and Africa indicates a disposition, on the part of the latter, to renounce their particular international usages and adopt those of Christendom.” 34 Editors of subsequent versions of Wheaton’s textbook never discussed whether the violence that European and American imperialists were unleashing upon non-Christians around the world might have propelled those people “to renounce their particular international usages.” Rather, they affirmed that the science was spreading naturally as predicted.35 In his 1866 edition of Elements of International Law, for example, Richard Dana wrote: “Already the most remarkable proof of the advance of Western civilization in the East, is the adoption of this work of Mr. Wheaton, by the Chinese government, as a textbook for its officials.” 36 Ascribing the terms of international law to the purview of civilized nations solidified the legality of practicing these terms. Expositors of civilizational theory maintained that civilization, like the terms that rode on its back, was a knowable thing. “I say fact, and I say it advisedly,” declared the early-nineteenth-century French historian François Guizot. “Civilization is just as much a fact as any other—it is a fact which like any other may be studied, described,
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and have its history recounted.” 37 Provided that an American or European permutation of civilization rested at the top, this “fact” underwrote the most fundamental assumption of international law: its terms were legal everywhere because the most civilized nations of Christendom had created them. As mentioned earlier, the terms of international law scripted colonizing politics and inscribed them as the dominant form of international relations. It was in these terms that leaders of colonizing nations described their countries’ takeovers and annexations of other countries as legal. Self-defined sovereign nations assumed legal control over nonsovereign entities, and this control over dependent countries defined the controlling regime as sovereign. These relationships—which defined their legitimacy as they were practiced—cemented the legitimacy of colonizing politics. When the Meiji government engaged Japan in this discursive order, colonizing politics traveled around the globe to what was considered the “far” end of civilization at the time.38 Colonizing policies announced their legitimacy by announcing that they were legitimate. The circularity of the logic allowed the colonizer to explain his or her dominant position over the colonized by explaining the action of colonization according to an unseen, yet seemingly undeniable, higher authority such as “the natural order of things.” 39 The terms of international law—the law of nations—afforded just such a transcendent authority to all its practitioners and enabled colonizers to make sense to each other. When Japan—the country on the world’s “far” end, which built an empire to rival those built at the world’s “center”—engaged with these terms, the discourse of enlightened exploitation became the internationally legal terminology of power. For centuries, all knowledge in Japan—foreign and indigenous, ranging from botany to economics—was routinely rendered into some form of intelligible Japanese script (Chinese-style Japanese [kanbun] or Japanese) in order to be of use to the government or its critics. Moreover, and of most direct importance to the translation of international terms, Japan’s history of Dutch and Western studies laid the practical foundations for translating these terms of power—terms that were arguably more alien than Chinese ones, but alien just the same. The vast number of new terms floating through early Meiji Japan invigorated dictionary authors.40 Debates spun around the viability of Japanese, and several authors reiterated Honda Toshiaki’s earlier frustrations and suggested doing away with the language altogether. In 1872, educational reformer Mori Arinori pleaded with Yale University’s William Whitney to help him create a
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new language for Japan because, as Mori saw it, Japanese was a “deranged Chinese” that was unusable in a modern nation.41 Two years later, the inaugural journal of the Meiji Six Society, (Meirokusha) featured a lead article by the progressivist Nishi Amane in which he advocated writing Japanese in “Western letters” (yöji).42 Even nativist Kurokawa Mayori argued for a contemporary resurrection of romaji—the practice of writing Japanese in the Roman alphabet—from its sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary roots, so as to make Japanese more accessible to foreigners.43 An environment in which opposing poles of the political spectrum challenged the future of the country’s language for similar reasons—let alone its terms of governance—brings into relief the volatility of the moment. In 1887, legal scholar Mitsukuri Rinshö spoke at the opening ceremony of the Meiji Law School in Tokyo. After thanking the school for inviting him, he introduced himself: “My grandfather was the Dutch studies scholar Mitsukuri Genpo, and ever since I was a little boy I also did Dutch studies. . . . Toward the end of the bakufu rule, however, when English studies came into fashion, I switched from Dutch to English. I worked diligently on my English, but because I didn’t have [a textbook]—my school didn’t have one either—I worked haphazardly. . . . I wanted to go to the West very much.” 44 Mitsukuri also recalled accompanying the shogun’s brother, Tokugawa Akitake, at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867: “I went to France. I became proficient at reading some French, and after a year I returned to Japan. The Meiji ishin occurred very shortly after that. I didn’t have even a smattering of knowledge about the original texts, but in the second year of Meiji [1869], the government ordered me to translate the French criminal codes. . . . I didn’t understand them. . . . There were no annotations, no glossaries, no instructors.” 45 By invoking the legacy of his grandfather, Genpo, Mitsukuri pointed to the important intellectual lineage of Dutch and Western studies in Meiji Japan and drew attention to the basis for his government’s ability to translate the prevailing, yet entirely confusing, terms of international politics. Although the “closed” conditions of Tokugawa Japan fostered a firm, conservative official knowledge that sustained the Tokugawa order, the “opening” with Korean and Chinese envoys and with Dutch merchants at Nagasaki brought books that enabled scholars to examine their own system from within, even if such inquiry cost them their lives. Understanding Dutch studies from this perspective helps counter a tradition in the field that has viewed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch studies as merely an escape from the rigidity of Tokugawa’s official Confucian thought. Scholars such as Tetsuo
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Najita have criticized this opinion by stressing that the primary objects of Dutch studies were compatible with the Confucian ethic of “saving the people” (saimin), asserting that any inquiry into language comprised a vital element of the teachings of Confucian studies.46 In 1639, the Tokugawa regime banned travel abroad, as well as open contact with the Dutch merchants in Nagasaki. Soon afterward, several scholars and interpreters, intrigued by the Dutch, began compiling word lists derived from interactions with them. These forgotten scholars were described by Sugimoto Tsutomu as “soldiers of words.” 47 In short, these “soldiers” constituted the intellectual frontline that paved the way for a body of knowledge to grow. Over time, other scholars used these preliminary word lists to develop larger schools of thought concerning what the words described; these schools were first called Dutch and then Western studies. Historians in general agree on when these schools coalesced into recognizable forms. For example, in 1771, when Maeno Ryötaku and Sugita Genpaku secretly dissected a corpse, they searched Dutch texts for information they found lacking in Chinese books in order to perform their experiment. 48 In contrast to the Tokugawa government’s earlier policy of declaring such studies heretical and punishable by death, these men openly published their findings, the New Text on Human Anatomy (Kaitai Shinsho), without penalty. This historical moment is widely considered the origin of Dutch studies.49 In similar fashion, in 1855 the government officially renamed its Bureau for Translating Barbarian Documents (Bansho Wagegoyö) to the Bureau for Western Studies (Yögakushö) to accommodate scholars busy with, among other things, the letters and treaties that Matthew Perry brought with him in 1853. Publications such as Hirose Takean’s General Description of America (1854) and Masaki Toku’s General Description of England (1854) further attest to the shogunate’s open desire for texts about “the West” at the time, and mark this decade as the beginning of Western studies.50 By the early Meiji period, the expressions “Dutch” and “Western” were indistinguishable in popular parlance, and decades later Japan’s famous internationalist Nitobe Inazö reminisced that at the time “[the word] Oranda did not necessarily mean ‘Dutch.’ The term was comprehensive enough to include all of Europe and America. It was, therefore, a disappointing revelation to learn later on that Holland was not the entire Western world.” 51 Around 1800, the Tokugawa government began ordering new kinds of maps, which indicated an official desire to express their control of Japan in ways that made sense to foreigners who were not Korean or Chinese. Such
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demands, moreover, permitted new kinds of quests for knowledge outside the kanji world. Studies arising from matters that did not ostensibly threaten the Tokugawa way of governing—such as autopsies, astronomy, and plant and animal taxonomies—broadened into a riskier desire to know about and to engage the mechanisms of power that sustained alien regimes. Russia in particular had begun to challenge the Tokugawa claim that Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) was Japanese territory, and the Tokugawa government wanted to demonstrate its control. 52 A map of the world, dated 1792 and thought to have been made by either military theorist Hayashi Köhei or painter Shiba Kokan, depicted Japan and Ezo as separate realms.53 In the early 1800s, a Russian ship returned several Japanese castaways to Japan, along with a Russian world map in which Ezo was drawn as non-Japanese territory. The terms of legal sovereignty did not yet concern the shogunate, but the process of delineating the official reach of Tokugawa lands caused great anxiety for the governing house. The shogunate wanted to make sure that Ezo was included in its lands. In addition, officials sensed the urgency of representing Great Japan’s territory (Dai Nippon) on a detailed longitudinal and latitudinal map similar to the Russian one, so that the Russian “barbarians” would understand. In 1809, the government requisitioned a complete map of Japan from cartographer Inö Tadataka.54 Until his death in 1818, Inö drafted numerous depictions of the territory of Japan that included Ezo and Kunashiri, the latter being a region that is in dispute to this day and continues to prevent the governments of Japan and Russia from signing a treaty to officially end World War II. Inö’s maps depicted Japan so precisely and exquisitely that the German adventurer Philipp Franz von Siebold made free use of them to make his famous maps—maps that, according to most sources, reintroduced Japan to the world in the late 1820s, rendering it ripe for the external world’s “opening.” 55 The shogunate wanted to make its territorial claims about the extent of the area of Japan understandable to all foreigners. This desire converged with the efforts of scholars who were just beginning to openly study alien forms of governance and military power. At the same time, it is critical to understand that, when the terms of international law arrived in Japan in the mid-nineteenth century, they did not suddenly reveal to Japanese officials that claiming land was the basis of ruling power. Maps from the seventh century c.e. (known as the “Gyogi maps,” after the Korean monk who introduced them) reveal that this concept had been in place in Japan for more than a thousand years.56 Despite long-standing Japanese knowledge of the territorial basis of power,
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the introduction of terms such as “sovereignty” fostered a new awareness that claiming land in international politics was a legally defined privilege. It was, furthermore, a privilege sanctioned as a form of “national” defense. The efforts of generations of scholars culminated in the Meiji declaration of national territorial sovereignty as one of its foundational terms of governance. Although the government strongly made this claim, Mitsukuri Rinshö alluded to the confusion of how this moment became possible during his 1887 speech at the Meiji Law School, when he recalled his frustrations at not having had a book for his English studies. A contemporary biography of Mitsukuri quoted one of his classmates to illustrate the mayhem involved in teaching and learning the languages and techniques of power prevalent in Europe at the time: “The students brought whatever books they had to school. One brought a book on physics, another brought an economics text. When one brought a geography book, someone else brought a book on law. Military texts, histories—the students brought their miscellaneous books [from home] and asked the teacher to instruct them.” 57 As Mitsukuri himself pointed out, many young Japanese who later became important Meiji diplomats and translators began their educations in this unsettled atmosphere. Whether the scholars and legal theorists who fashioned Japanese terms for the vocabulary of international law redefined existing kanji or coined new combinations, they clearly did not thwart their initial efforts by worrying whether the Japanese renderings fully captured the original French, English, or German. The texts of international law available in Japan by the early Meiji era— along with the jumble of scripts in diplomatic notes—reveal the creative volatility that existed regarding the shaping of new terms in something as apparently normative as the legal vocabulary among nations. At the time, for example, there was not even a standard term for “international” (most often bankoku was used, but increasingly today’s term, kokusai, appeared). The first books in Japan concerning the practice of international law—what literature scholar Sawa Ömi has described as “the epitome of bakamatsu-era Western political thought”—appeared at this time of makeshift language studies. 58 In 1862, the Tokugawa government sent Nishi Amane and Tsuda Mamichi to Leiden University, in the hope that what they learned there would yield the knowledge to help resurrect the disintegrating regime. When Nishi returned to Japan in 1866, he turned his notes from Simon Vissering’s tutorials on international law into the basis for his compilation Bankoku Köhö Yakugi. The Tokugawa government’s now twice-renamed Bureau of Translation and For-
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eign Affairs (the Kaiseijo) published the text in kanbun in 1868. 59 The same year that Nishi published his book, Tsutsumi Kokushishi wrote a synopsis of William Martin’s Chinese rendition of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law (Bankoku Köhö Yakugi), offering the first description of the terms of the science fully rendered in the Japanese language.60 Nishi and Tsutsumi’s efforts to translate into Japanese the terms that dominated international and diplomatic discourse indicate how both men understood the power inherent in these terms. For his part, in the opening statements of his book Bankoku Köhö Yakugi, Tsutsumi proposed that “a translator earnestly searches for the spirit” of the text.61 Nishi, on the other hand, had worked as the shogunate’s interpreter during the treaty talks with American consul Townsend Harris, negotiating in Dutch with Harris’s interpreter.62 Nishi and Tsutsumi wrote descriptions of international law, not practical manuals for how to use the terms. Their work was, therefore, akin to the early Nagasaki translators—the “soldiers of words”—who enabled later schools of thought to flourish. To compound the confusion, in an effort to make international legal terms meaningful in actual use, an anti-Tokugawa regional daimyo—the Satsuma ruler Shimazu Hisamitsu—commissioned the first text of international law in Japan that attempted to render the terms practical in Japanese. By the mid1860s, the Tokugawa shogunate’s hold on government had almost collapsed, and envoys from several of the “first-rank” nations tried to align themselves with various regional daimyo—in particular those critical of the shogunate. These local rulers, in turn, wanted to understand the international terms used by the foreign envoys. Especially after British ships firebombed Kagoshima in 1863, to avenge the murder of merchant Charles Richardson, the powerful Satsuma daimyo ordered Shigeno Yatsusugu, a teacher in the realm’s Confucian academy at the time, to negotiate with British representatives. When the talks ended, Shimazu (an outspoken advocate of “expelling the barbarian”) then ordered Shigeno to translate into Japanese a complete version of Martin’s Chinese rendering of Wheaton’s International Law. 63 Shigeno was a scholar of Chinese studies by training, and, in response to Shimazu’s request, in 1869 he produced a facing-page rendering of the text, which juxtaposed his own Japanese translation of Martin’s Chinese version with Martin’s original translation of Henry Wheaton’s book. Unlike Nishi and Tsutsumi, Shigeno did not attempt to describe or generalize broad features of international law or its historical place in European thought. Rather, he offered working definitions in Japanese of the fundamental terms of international law. Shigeno’s book
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explained international terms through the medium of what had been the legal-reference language in the region until that time: Chinese. Shigeno made the terms workable in Japanese by providing ready, comparative explanations that were comprehensible to most educated members of his domain at the time. Less than a generation later, Mitsukuri Rinsho played historian and even made light of the random atmosphere in which such international vocabulary became Japanese: There were, in fact, many parts that I didn’t understand. And even when I did understand, I was at a loss because there were no words to translate the terms. Today young men use terms such as right and obligation with ease. But when I was young, I used these terms with great difficulty in translation. I didn’t claim to have invented anything, however, so I wasn’t able to get a patent. (Laughter. Applause.) The words raito [right] and oburigeshyon [obligation] were translated as kenri gimu in the Chinese version of International Law, and I took them, but I wasn’t stealing.64 Mitsukuri’s academic career as one of the foremost scholars of French law in Japan in the 1870s and 1880s stemmed in part from his language studies and his timely “command” of French.65 During these decades, the Meiji government reworked Napoleonic criminal codes into Japanese, and legal thinkers debated whether the regime should adopt German or French civil codes. Mitsukuri actively participated in these projects. Granting him the privilege of hyperbole in memory, as a writer of the terms around which this activity revolved, he was very much a part of the process of making these legal terms Japanese. Mitsukuri described how recently radical concepts such as “right” and “obligation” had fallen asleep in the language, as it were—how they had become normative terms.66 In using the terms of international law for Japan, legal theorists, policy writers, interpreters, diplomats, journalists, and others rendered terms such as “sovereignty” and “independence” commonplace. Mitsukuri’s admonition to the young students who “use[d] these words with ease” brings into relief a landscape in which terms that totally transformed political interaction in Japan had become customary within twenty years. Before moving on to the next chapter to consider how Meiji diplomats transformed international terms into Japanese practice, by way of closure here it is instructive to think about the government’s official measure of itself visà-vis such terms at the outset of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1874, the
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Japanese Foreign Ministry began publishing an English-language compilation of its activities—treaties, agreements, protocols—that it conducted with the Powers. By all measures, the book was a dry, chronological compendium that made a convenient reference book for foreign legations or students interested in developments in the “far” end of the world. By 1899, the preface to the fourth edition recounted the text’s history, as well as self-consciously indicating how far the Japanese government believed it had come: “In order to afford an easy opportunity to consult the Conventional Agreements regulating foreign intercourse of this Empire, a volume containing the Treaties and Conventions concluded between Japan and other Powers was first published by this Department in 1874; a revised edition was issued in 1884 . . . and the latter publication was followed by a supplementary volume in 1899.” 67 The promoters of Japan’s newly expanding place in the world clearly defined Japan among the Powers by referring to them as the “other” ones. Meiji leaders had made international terms Japanese in practical application and law; such terms enabled Japan to conclude new trade treaties with England and Germany, for example, and they confidently displayed the transformation abroad.
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CHAPTER 3
THE VOCABULARY OF POWER
F or centuries, a shared knowledge and practice of kanji had facilitated official relations in what is now called the East Asian world. When the Meiji government chose to engage Japan in international terms, however, it ruptured this order. Politicians and diplomats went beyond scholars’ word lists and dictionaries and entrenched the terms in practice. They made these international terms legal precedent. During the final years of the Tokugawa regime, the United States and the European nations bound Japan with the so-called unequal treaties. As historians have long explained, these treaties mirrored similar arrangements elsewhere and granted extraterritorial privileges for foreigners in Japan. Some Meiji statesmen accepted these arrangements as a temporary condition, but others decried them as an affront to national dignity. Most political biographies and general histories of this period make it clear that debates over treaty revision preoccupied the generation running the country.1 From the perspective of international terms, because the Powers imposed conditions that restricted Japanese sovereignty through these treaties, Japan was not a full subject in international law. All of the Japanese texts on international law at the time quoted Henry Wheaton’s basic explanation: “states which are thus dependent on other States, in respect to the perfect external sovereignty, have been termed semi-sovereign States.” 2 Evocative of the privileges that still benefit members of the U.S. military in many places around the world, for example, extraterritorial privileges at the time meant that certain foreigners in Japan (Americans, French, English, Germans, Dutch, and Russians, for example) were not subject to Japanese law. According to the logic of the day, this 45
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provision strongly indicated that members of the international arena did not consider Japan civilized enough to fully belong in their sphere. Examining pressing debates in Japan at the time from the vantage point of international terms reveals a significant yet underappreciated historical transformation. The ability of Meiji state aggrandizers to engage Japan wholly as a fully sovereign state in the international community depended heavily on its newly chosen discourse of power. From 1868 onward, policymakers used these terms successfully vis-à-vis the Powers, eradicating the remaining tendrils of extraterritoriality by 1911. Not coincidentally, during the same forty-year period—Japanese leaders also relied on international terms to rewrite policy within Asia. In particular, Meiji rulers used these terms to forge the path to Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. The intellectually volatile atmosphere of the early Meiji period prevailed when Japan embarked on its mission to redescribe the country’s place in the world. Scholars did not yet agree on translations for even the most fundamental terms, and the statesmen required tutors at almost every step of policymaking. An example from a preliminary stage in Japan’s new relations with Korea brings this condition into relief. The 1876 Treaty of Kanghwa established Japanese settlement areas in Korea. Needless to say, Koreans did not calmly accept these unprecedented incursions. In 1882, in an incident known in Korean as the Imo Gullan, several hundred unpaid and unfed Korean troops protested the Japanese presence in Seoul, as well as the Korean court’s failure to pay its soldiers, killing some twenty Japanese soldiers and setting fire to the Japanese legation building. Meiji Council of State members Itö Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru consulted the government’s French legal scholar, Gustave Boissonade, on how best to respond according to international law. 3 Several years earlier, the Japanese ambassador to France met Boissonade and invited him to Tokyo to advise scholars and policymakers in drafting new legal codes. 4 Soon after his arrival, Boissonade’s role broadened, and politicians and law students alike came to rely on him as an encyclopedia of civilized and modern European legal practice. In 1882, Boissonade answered Itö and Inoue’s questions in a series of memoranda that explained the nature of relations between what he termed “unequal states.” Ukawa Morisaburö, a student of French language and French law, translated Boissonade’s notes for Itö and Inoue. Ukawa’s efforts reveal the wordy sediments that often collected in official documents, as scholars and diplomats wrote new terms within the same legal and diplomatic procedures that
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THE VOCABULARY OF POWER
F or centuries, a shared knowledge and practice of kanji had facilitated official relations in what is now called the East Asian world. When the Meiji government chose to engage Japan in international terms, however, it ruptured this order. Politicians and diplomats went beyond scholars’ word lists and dictionaries and entrenched the terms in practice. They made these international terms legal precedent. During the final years of the Tokugawa regime, the United States and the European nations bound Japan with the so-called unequal treaties. As historians have long explained, these treaties mirrored similar arrangements elsewhere and granted extraterritorial privileges for foreigners in Japan. Some Meiji statesmen accepted these arrangements as a temporary condition, but others decried them as an affront to national dignity. Most political biographies and general histories of this period make it clear that debates over treaty revision preoccupied the generation running the country.1 From the perspective of international terms, because the Powers imposed conditions that restricted Japanese sovereignty through these treaties, Japan was not a full subject in international law. All of the Japanese texts on international law at the time quoted Henry Wheaton’s basic explanation: “states which are thus dependent on other States, in respect to the perfect external sovereignty, have been termed semi-sovereign States.” 2 Evocative of the privileges that still benefit members of the U.S. military in many places around the world, for example, extraterritorial privileges at the time meant that certain foreigners in Japan (Americans, French, English, Germans, Dutch, and Russians, for example) were not subject to Japanese law. According to the logic of the day, this 45
46
Japan’s Colonization of Korea
provision strongly indicated that members of the international arena did not consider Japan civilized enough to fully belong in their sphere. Examining pressing debates in Japan at the time from the vantage point of international terms reveals a significant yet underappreciated historical transformation. The ability of Meiji state aggrandizers to engage Japan wholly as a fully sovereign state in the international community depended heavily on its newly chosen discourse of power. From 1868 onward, policymakers used these terms successfully vis-à-vis the Powers, eradicating the remaining tendrils of extraterritoriality by 1911. Not coincidentally, during the same forty-year period—Japanese leaders also relied on international terms to rewrite policy within Asia. In particular, Meiji rulers used these terms to forge the path to Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. The intellectually volatile atmosphere of the early Meiji period prevailed when Japan embarked on its mission to redescribe the country’s place in the world. Scholars did not yet agree on translations for even the most fundamental terms, and the statesmen required tutors at almost every step of policymaking. An example from a preliminary stage in Japan’s new relations with Korea brings this condition into relief. The 1876 Treaty of Kanghwa established Japanese settlement areas in Korea. Needless to say, Koreans did not calmly accept these unprecedented incursions. In 1882, in an incident known in Korean as the Imo Gullan, several hundred unpaid and unfed Korean troops protested the Japanese presence in Seoul, as well as the Korean court’s failure to pay its soldiers, killing some twenty Japanese soldiers and setting fire to the Japanese legation building. Meiji Council of State members Itö Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru consulted the government’s French legal scholar, Gustave Boissonade, on how best to respond according to international law. 3 Several years earlier, the Japanese ambassador to France met Boissonade and invited him to Tokyo to advise scholars and policymakers in drafting new legal codes. 4 Soon after his arrival, Boissonade’s role broadened, and politicians and law students alike came to rely on him as an encyclopedia of civilized and modern European legal practice. In 1882, Boissonade answered Itö and Inoue’s questions in a series of memoranda that explained the nature of relations between what he termed “unequal states.” Ukawa Morisaburö, a student of French language and French law, translated Boissonade’s notes for Itö and Inoue. Ukawa’s efforts reveal the wordy sediments that often collected in official documents, as scholars and diplomats wrote new terms within the same legal and diplomatic procedures that
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Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power
Alexis Dudden
From its creation in the early twentieth-century, policymakers used the discourse of international law to legitimate Japan's empire. Although the Japanese state aggrandizers' reliance on this discourse did not create the imperial nation Japan would become, their fluent use of its terms inscribed Japan's claims as legal practice within Japan and abroad. Focusing on Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910, Alexis Dudden gives long-needed attention to the intellectual history of the empire and brings to light presumptions of the twentieth century's so-called international system by describing its most powerful--and most often overlooked--member's engagement with that system. Early chapters describe the global atmosphere that declared Japan the legal ruler of Korea and frame the significance of the discourse of early twentieth-century international law and how its terms became Japanese. Dudden then brings together these discussions in her analysis of how Meiji leaders embedded this discourse into legal precedent for Japan, particularly in its relations with Korea. Remaining chapters explore the limits of these ''universal'' ideas and consider how the international arena measured Japan's use of its terms. Dudden squares her examination of the legality of Japan's imperialist designs by discussing the place of colonial policy studies in Japan at the time, demonstrating how this new discipline further created a common sense that Japan's empire accorded to knowledgeable practice. This landmark study greatly enhances our understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of Japan's imperial aspirations. In this carefully researched and cogently argued work, Dudden makes clear that, even before Japan annexed Korea, it had embarked on a legal and often legislating mission to make its colonization legitimate in the eyes of the world. In so doing, Tokyo's early twentieth-century policy makers confirmed Japan's place in the international history of empire.
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