Japanese Annexation of Korea (1910): End of the Korean Empire

The Japanese annexation of Korea in August 1910 ended the independent Korean Empire and made the peninsula a colony of Japan. It completed a five-year process that began with the protectorate treaty of 1905, imposed after Japan’s victory over Russia. Japanese rule lasted until 1945, and the circumstances of the annexation remain a source of controversy between Japan and the two Koreas today.

Background: a kingdom between empires

For centuries Korea’s Joseon dynasty had been a tributary of China while keeping its internal independence. In the late 19th century Japan, China and Russia competed for influence there. Japan forced Korea to open ports through the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876, and its victory in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 ended Chinese influence.

In 1895 Japanese agents and Korean collaborators murdered Queen Min (Empress Myeongseong), who had favoured Russia. King Gojong fled to the Russian legation for a year, and in 1897 he proclaimed the Korean Empire to assert his country’s equal status. Rivalry between Japan and Russia over Korea and Manchuria then led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.

The protectorate, 1905-1910

During the war Japan stationed troops in Korea and imposed advisers on its government. Britain, in its renewed alliance with Japan, and the United States, in informal talks between Secretary of War William Howard Taft and Prime Minister Katsura Taro in July 1905, accepted Japanese predominance there. In the Treaty of Portsmouth of September 1905, Russia recognised Japan’s “paramount” interests in Korea.

On 17 November 1905, Ito Hirobumi pressed Korean ministers to sign a protectorate treaty, known in Korea as the Eulsa Treaty, while Japanese troops surrounded the palace. Five ministers who agreed, including Lee Wan-yong, are still called the “Eulsa traitors”. Korea lost control of its foreign affairs, and Ito became the first Resident-General in 1906.

In 1907 Emperor Gojong secretly sent three envoys to the Second Hague Peace Conference to protest. They were refused admission. Japan used the affair to force Gojong to abdicate in favour of his son Sunjong in July 1907. A new treaty that month gave the Resident-General control over internal administration, and on 1 August 1907 the Korean army was disbanded.

Resistance

The disbanding of the army sparked a wave of armed resistance by “righteous armies” (uibyeong), made up of former soldiers, peasants and Confucian scholars. Japanese records count well over 2,000 clashes between 1907 and 1911 and roughly 17,000 to 18,000 Korean fighters killed, figures that are probably incomplete.

Others resisted through the “patriotic enlightenment” movement of schools, newspapers and societies aimed at building national strength. On 26 October 1909 the activist An Jung-geun killed Ito Hirobumi at Harbin, an event described in Assassination of Ito Hirobumi. In December 1909 Lee Wan-yong was stabbed and seriously wounded in Seoul.

The annexation treaty

The Japanese cabinet had approved annexation in principle in July 1909. In May 1910 General Terauchi Masatake, the army minister, was appointed Resident-General with instructions to complete it. He strengthened the military police and suppressed the Korean press.

On 22 August 1910 Terauchi and Prime Minister Lee Wan-yong signed the treaty. Its first article stated that the emperor of Korea ceded “completely and permanently” all rights of sovereignty over Korea to the emperor of Japan. The treaty was announced on 29 August 1910, and the Korean Empire ceased to exist. The Korean imperial family received titles and allowances within the Japanese imperial system. In Korea the news was met with grief and silent anger rather than mass protest, as most open opposition had already been suppressed; many activists left for Manchuria, the Russian Far East, China and the United States to continue the struggle from abroad.

Key people

Gojong (1852-1919) ruled Korea from 1864, first as king and from 1897 as emperor. He resisted Japanese control through secret diplomacy and appeals to foreign powers, but was forced off the throne in 1907. His death in January 1919, rumoured to be poisoning, helped trigger the March First Movement.

Sunjong (1874-1926), his son, was the last emperor of Korea. He reigned for only three years, largely under Japanese control, and lived afterwards in Seoul with the Japanese title of “King Yi”. His funeral in 1926 became the occasion for another independence demonstration.

Lee Wan-yong (1858-1926), the prime minister who signed the annexation treaty, is remembered in Korea as the archetypal collaborator; he was made a count in the Japanese peerage. Ito Hirobumi shaped the protectorate as Resident-General, and General Terauchi Masatake, who completed the annexation and became the first governor-general, later served as prime minister of Japan from 1916 to 1918.

Among the many leaders of resistance were the righteous army commanders Min Jong-sik and Shin Dol-seok, a commoner who became a celebrated guerrilla leader, and later the exiled nationalists who founded the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai in 1919. The scholar Hwang Hyeon took his own life in protest when the annexation was announced, leaving poems that became famous in Korea.

Colonial rule

Korea was renamed Chosen and placed under a Government-General in Seoul, renamed Keijo, with Terauchi as the first governor-general. The first decade, known as “military rule”, saw the press restricted, political organisations banned and a large land survey that transferred much land to the colonial state and Japanese companies.

After the March First Movement of 1919, a peaceful independence campaign that was violently suppressed, Japan allowed somewhat more cultural freedom. From the late 1930s, however, colonial policy sought to assimilate Koreans, pressing them to use Japanese names and language and mobilising hundreds of thousands for labour and military service in the Second World War.

Colonial rule also brought railways, ports, factories, mines and a modern school system, built mainly to serve Japanese strategic and economic needs. Historians continue to debate how far this development benefited Koreans, who were largely excluded from senior posts and ownership. By the 1940s several hundred thousand Japanese settlers lived in Korea, while large numbers of Koreans had moved to Japan and Manchuria. Liberation came on 15 August 1945, when Japan surrendered, and the peninsula was divided into Soviet and American occupation zones along the 38th parallel.

The debate over legality

Many Korean historians argue that the 1905 and 1910 treaties were invalid because they were signed under coercion, and because the 1910 imperial rescript announcing the annexation lacked Sunjong’s personal signature. The Japanese government has maintained that the treaties were legally concluded under the international law of the time.

The 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and South Korea stated that the earlier treaties were “already null and void”, wording that each side has interpreted in its own way.

Timeline

• 1897, October: Gojong proclaims the Korean Empire.
• 1905, 17 November: The Eulsa Treaty makes Korea a Japanese protectorate.
• 1907, July: Gojong is forced to abdicate; Sunjong becomes emperor.
• 1907, 1 August: The Korean army is disbanded; righteous army resistance spreads.
• 1909, 26 October: Ito Hirobumi is assassinated at Harbin.
• 1910, 22 August: The annexation treaty is signed in Seoul.
• 1910, 29 August: The annexation is proclaimed; the Korean Empire ends.
• 1945, 15 August: Japan’s surrender ends colonial rule.

Why it matters

The annexation ended over five centuries of Joseon rule and began 35 years of colonial government that transformed Korean society. Its legacy, from questions of legality to wartime mobilisation, still shapes relations between Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and its end in 1945 led directly to the division of the peninsula and, five years later, the Korean War.