Corea: The Hermit Nation

by William Elliot Griffis

Then Russia unmasked. Calling to her aid France and Germany, this triple alliance compelled Japan to give up all claims upon the continent and to be content with an indemnity and the island of Formosa. Had the Japanese possessed a fleet of battle-ships, they would have refused this insolent demand and declared war on Russia. As it was, the treaty of Shimonoséki, between Li Hung Chang and Ito and Mutsu, was signed. The Japanese spent the indemnity money on a new navy and proceeded to gird themselves for their next war with another giant, and to show again the difference between bulk and brain.

Corea suffered surprisingly little from the presence of two great armies on her soil. Her people were paid liberally for labor and materials which they so grudgingly furnished to the Japanese, who were not, in this instance, sufferers on account of their own excess of politeness, while the Chinese troops were within her borders too short a time to be a very heavy tax. Only around Ping-an was there much public or private suffering. [[479]]

In Seoul, the Mikado’s envoy, as early as August, began to insist upon a programme of reforms, which, had they been carried out, would have amounted virtually to a new constitution.

In the reconstruction of the administration of the seven departments, that of Public Works was broadened to include Agriculture and Commerce, and in place of the Department of Ceremonies there was created one of Education co-ordinate with the others. A mighty programme of reforms, twenty-three in number, was prepared, but enough to make up several social tornadoes, some of which were possible, while others seemed too radical and absurd on their faces. A new mint began to issue coins in European form.

The second son of the King was sent to Tokio to bear the thanks of the nation and Government for having secured the independence of Chō-sen. The Corean sovereign, on January 8, 1895, with tremendous picturesqueness of procession, pomp, and circumstance, proceeded to the temple of his ancestors and with imposing ceremonies solemnly adjured all vassalage and dependence upon China. The official name of the new empire is Dai Han or Ta Han, that is, the Great Han, single and sovereign, as contrasted with the three (San Han) of ancient history. With this royal act vanished from history the strangest anomaly in diplomacy, and one of the last of the dual sovereignties in Asia. Furthermore, from this time forth, the whole tissue and complexion of Corean politics altered. The native scholars began to seek a new intellectual climate and the culture of the West. Scores of students were sent abroad and many foreigners were employed, as in the new Japan of 1868.

When, however, Count Inouye, one of the purest and best statesmen in Japan, in co-operation with the Reform Committee of the Corean Government began his labors, the old chronic difficulties at once presented themselves and in legions. There seemed to be no real patriotism in the country. Rare indeed was the native of ability who was not hopelessly inoculated with the vices of the old clans and noble families, whose only idea of the relation between government and office holders was that of the udder and the sucking pig. Plots and jealousies continually hampered reform. The real problem was to separate the functions of the Court from those of the Government, which in Corea, as in China, had never been [[480]]fully done. In Japan the holding of office by females in the palace had been abolished. In the palace at Seoul their influence could secretly nullify public business. The question of succession to the throne without Court intrigue through the influence of the Queen and the mob of palace underlings, and the reconstruction of the military system and that of civil and criminal law were grappled with. Over one hundred young men were sent to Japan to study. On June 20, 1895, a royal ordinance was issued dividing the kingdom into thirteen prefectures, five of the large provinces being divided into two parts, with 151 districts and 339 magistracies. A cabinet, with nine boards of administration, was organized, and a judiciary system for the entire country formed, a postal system inaugurated, and the army, consisting of 5,000 men, was put under the instruction of Japanese and American officers. For all these enterprises, money was of the first necessity. Attempts, therefore, were made to reform the revenue, making taxes payable in money instead of in kind, while lands illegally seized were restored to their rightful owners.

All seemed to promise well, notwithstanding that many of the old-style gentry, who saw in the change a lessening of their income, still opposed what they called the “civilization nonsense.” The Chinese merchants gradually returned after the war and resumed business. Foreign trade in 1895 amounted to nearly thirteen million dollars. Commercial prosperity seemed to be general and increasing. A fitful insurrection of the Tong Haks, in the summer of 1895, was completely subdued by Japanese troops. All was proceeding auspiciously until Count Inouye left Corea for a visit home. The Queen, who feared that her father-in-law, the Regent, might make a bad use of the Japanese troops, was anxious. Count Inouye assured her that the Mikado’s Government “would not fail to protect the royal house of Corea.” Thus allaying her well-grounded suspicions, Count Inouye left Seoul about September 15th.

There were still living in the peninsula the two ablest characters, man and woman, in modern Corean history; the Queen, bound to overcome, and nullify by her craft and the power of the Min clan, the reforms begun by the Japanese, and the old Regent, who was bent on getting his son’s wife out of the way, by fire, sword, poison, or dynamite. Nominally about seventeen thousand [[481]]useless persons in Government employ and pay had been discharged, and the Queen’s palace attendants reduced from hundreds to a dozen. But after Inouye had gone away, these parasites gradually returned at her invitation, until the palace was crowded again as of old with her women, eunuchs, servants, and underlings of all sorts, while her clansfolk prepared for another of those plots so characteristic of unregenerated Corea. At the signs of danger, Prince Pak Yong Hio, minister of Home Affairs, fled the capital. It looked to the Japanese as if all their work and influence were to come to nothing. They had been foiled by a woman.

The Tokio Government had appointed as its envoy, in place of Count Inouye, a military officer named Miura, who, like the French Zouave de Bellonet, of whom we have read before, brought to his work in Seoul the habits of the camp and the methods of the soldier, rather than the patience, tact, and civil abilities of his immediate predecessor. About this time there were in Seoul many Japanese, of all grades of character, especially soshi, political bullies or “heelers” from Tokio, angry at the Queen, who, as they professed to believe, was the friend of Russia. These men gathered many other spirits like unto themselves from among the native soldiers who had been discharged through the Queen’s influence. Soon both the native and the foreign worthies concluded, with the Tai-wen Kun, that for the good of Corea the Queen would have to be killed. On the early morning of October 8th the Japanese troops were conveniently and purposely posted so as to make possible the entrance into the palace of a motley band of ruffians, some sixty in number. Seizing the Queen in her own apartments, they murdered her, dragged her corpse into one of the areas outside, poured petroleum over the rice straw mats and clothing and set the heap on fire. Thus perished one of the ablest women in Corean annals. A new Government was quickly formed under the instigation of the Tai-wen Kun. A radical programme of reforms was published, new officers were appointed at home and envoys sent abroad. With horrible mockery of history and justice, this “rebel cabinet”—as the King later stigmatized it in public documents—pretended that the Queen was alive and forthwith conducted an absurd travesty of publicly trying some native accused of her murder. In the name of his Majesty a proclamation was forged degrading the Queen to the level of a servant. All this was done by men, some [[482]]of whom, it seems impossible to doubt, were implicated in the palace slaughter. When on November 27th some ultra-patriotic Coreans, opposed to the Japanese and the policy of the Tai-wen Kun, made an effort to drive out their new rulers by an attack on the palace and failed, the chief participants, as well as those alleged on trumped-up charges to have been in the affair of October 8th, were executed December 8th. Meanwhile there were anti-Japanese riots in many parts of the country.

On hearing of the strange use of the Mikado’s soldiery in Seoul, the Japanese Government promptly recalled Miura and arrested forty-seven persons supposed to have taken part in the assault on the palace in Seoul. Nevertheless, in the court at Hiroshima, technical evidence against them was lacking and the whole band of this new I-ro-ha of modern Japanese heroism was discharged free of blame, or at least without the stigma of condemnation. It is probable that the whole affair of October 8th was connived at by a reckless diplomatic blunderer, to the regret and mortification of the Mikado’s ministers and the national sentiment of Japan. In any event, it proved the death-blow, for a time at least, of Japanese prestige in Corea. In December the troops of Japan evacuated the country.