The 1590s Japanese Invasions of Korea

This paper examines how the Japanese popular imaginings of Korea were constructed in conjunction with the imperial transformation of the Meiji state. How did the Meiji Japanese try to resolve what Benedict Anderson (1983: 93) has termed "the inner incompatibility of empire and nation" as they won wars against China (1894-1895) and Russia (1904Russia ( -1905 and expanded spheres of influence over neighboring Asian countries? How were the cultural boundaries of the Japanese nation re-drawn, and how in the process were the Japanese self and Asian Others re-figured in new relationship to each other? Or, more concretely, how and what sorts of perceptions of Korea and the Korean people were produced and consumed during the late Meiji period when the "new lands" (shinryodo) were placed under firm control?

Journal of Japanese Studies, 2007

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 Hǒ 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 202

Book Review of Japanese Colonial Legacy in Korea 1910-1945 by George Akita and Brandon Palmer (2015)

Pacific Affairs, 2023

Book review of Korea: A History (2022) written by Eugene Y. Park. Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. xiv, 414 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9781503629844.

Korean Studies, 2015

Many agree that Japanese colonial rule of Korea from 1910 to 1945 was intense and pervasive due to the empire's interest in the peninsula's strategic value and assimilation policies targeting the Korean people. Although many are interested in the subject of Korea under Japanese colonial rule, the majority of the researchers come from Japan, Korea, and the United States, that is, the nations that played the roles of ruler, ruled, and liberator. Scholars in these countries naturally view history from different perspectives. In his The Pacific War and its Political Legacies (2009), Denny Roy, a scholar of Chinese political history, discusses divergent accounts and perspectives of the Pacific War (1941-45) presented by China, Japan, and America and calls this discrepancy a Rashomon effect, the term made famous by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film, in which the same incident is recounted contradictorily by several characters involved. Similarly, Japanese rule of Korea in the first half of the last century is viewed and interpreted from conflicting viewpoints, reflecting the researchers' backgrounds. An increasing number of scholars today, however, seek a middle ground through examining the rich historical records available. George Akita and Brandon Palmer's book Japanese Colonial Legacy in Korea 1910-1945: A New Perspective captures this new trend. Post-liberation Korean scholars perceived the colonial period from the dichotomous viewpoint of Japanese oppression versus Korean resistance, depicting Japanese rule as ruthless, exploitive, and without merit. This standpoint is represented by C. I. Eugene Kim and Han-kyo Kim's seminal monograph Korea and the Politics of Imperialism 1876-1919 (1967) as well as many works that followed. Akita and Palmer refer to this black-and-white interpretation by Korean scholars as a ''nationalist (or patriotic) historical paradigm.'' Seventy years after the end of the colonial period, this paradigm has not lost momentum in South Korea. Many in the United States have also been critical of Japanese colonialism. As Akita and Palmer point out, in 1945, the victorious Allied powers were convinced that ''Japan, in every aspect of its society, economy, culture, religion, and governance, was completely flawed,'' and ''these views of Japan spilled over into perceptions of the Japanese as brutal colonial overlords'' (p. 197). Although postwar American scholars of Japanese history often challenged this bias in search of more balanced views, some

Sai, 2015

Despite the numerous empirical studies on colonial Korea many fundamental questions about Japanese colonialism require further examination. A new approach to understanding Japan’s colonial project is needed to overcome the limits of the colonial exploitation and colonial modernity thesis. A survey of recent works in colonial studies published in the English language can provide some fresh perspectives in this regard. Many of the recent studies on colonial Korea fully engage the historiography of modern Japanese history and provide important theoretical approaches into the questions of historical structure and agency. While not without their limitations, the results provide more complex understanding of the Japanese colonizers and the ambiguities of colonial rule. The arriving at a more comprehensive approach to colonial Korea will require considerable more effort, but the foundations for such an endeavor have finally emerged in the recent English language studies.

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2015

In his most recent book, which focuses on post-Kanghwa Treaty (1876) Korea, Watanabe Sōki (2014), the prolific scholar of Japanese-American relations, addresses an important question: why did the United States eventually come to support Japan's decision to annex the Korean peninsula? He argues that this decision represented a departure from a position the two countries had traditionally held: supporting an independent Korea (199). The ramifications of this shift are important in Korea's pre-annexation history, but also in its post-liberation history, when again the United States showed a greater affinity toward Japan than toward southern Korea. Watanabe focuses on the threats that Japan perceived from the Asian continent to justify the Japanese government's change in policy toward the Korean peninsula, which it saw as a conduit that China or Russia could exploit to threaten Japanese sovereignty and Caprio Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal No. 15 (June 2015) • (http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-15) 178 peripheral interests. Additionally, Korea faced the threat of colonization by a traditional European imperial power. Watanabe frequently cites the 1866 French attack on Korea in retaliation for the murder of French Catholic missionaries, as if, but for other distractions, France too might have been a more active imperial participant in peninsular affairs (17, 78, 132-133, 200, 233, 293). These threats, along with the Korean government's unwillingness (or inability) to strengthen its domestic and international position, led Japan and the United States to retreat from their position of protecting Korean independence and see as inevitable Japan's annexation of the peninsula. A Korea left on its own threatened regional peace and security, as witnessed between 1895 and 1905, when Japan went to war first with China and then Russia. This same argument was one the Japanese also formally employed in 1910 to justify their annexation of the peninsula. Japan's "Korea Opening Project" (Chōsen kaikoku purojekuto) did encourage Korean reform efforts, which Watanabe explains in detail. After the Korean government finalized the treaty with Japan, it sponsored missions to China, Japan, and the United States in the early 1880s to accumulate information useful for Korean modernization. Upon their return, participants who formed the "opening faction" (kaikaha) were confronted by, using Watanabe's terms, the "conservative" (hoshuha) or pro-China "serving the great" (J. shidaiha; K. sidaeha) faction. These confrontations forced many Korean reformers to live in exile. With the defeat of the 1895 Kabo reform movement, the author laments, the Koreans squandered their "last chance" to protect their independence. Watanabe provides meticulous descriptions of key events that influenced this period. These include Japanese versions of the treaties that Japan signed with Korea and Caprio

Korean Studies, 2000

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2014

Journal of World History, 2014

This article argues that advances in drilling techniques and the use of muskets—essential ingredients of the famous Military Revolution paradigm—were central to Korean military reforms following the Imjin War of 1592–1598. Drawing on recent work in East Asian military history that argues that guns also wrought deep changes in non-European ways of war, we use the Korean military of the Chosŏn dynasty, a fascinating nexus of Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch influences, as a case study to compare East Asian tactics with European ones. Using military manuals from the seventeenth century, we show that European drilling regimes—centered around musketry units—had striking analogues in Korea (as they also did in China and Japan). The very fact of these similarities in such far-removed societies should point us toward caution in making pronouncements about a “Western way of war,” making clear that there is a need for a truly global military history.

CIPENGLISH, 2014

For this first study in French language on the economics of the Japanese colonial empire, we have chosen to focus on the Korean case, from the establishment of the first railways on the peninsula in 1900 until the crisis of the colonial system in 1919 (March 1st Movement). The colonization of Korean was promising: an extensive land with a large population located very close to Japan. But rapidly, it was hampered by several grave difficulties. The colonial main infrastructures, as railways and banking system, suffered from, alternatively, the lack of investment and the “Manchuria policy” promoted by Terauchi Masatake. The industrial production remained marginal, despite its vigorous growth. This sector has been stimulated greatly by a stock-exchange fever starting in 1916, but suddenly collapsed as the bubble burst in 1919. The exterior trade of Korea (including with Japan) continued to increase its deficit. Japan used the colony just to obtain rice an iron ore, but the lack of investments in these sectors did not enable Korean production to compete successfully with other Asian producers (French Indochina, Taiwan, China etc.). This economic failure made the Japanese domination particularly unbearable to the Korean people: the bursting of the economic bubble in Japan just after the end of the War in Europe meant the end of any hope for a better life in the colony. The fast and high inflation, coupled with the absence of any economic policy, contributed greatly to the sparkling of the March First Movement. ERRATA: the railway concession was obtained in July 1898 (not "July 1989") ; the average annual population growth rate from 1900 to 1920 is 1,3% (not "11%").

Asian Perspectives, 2007

The Republic of Korea and Japan share a tumultuous history, but arguably no period has caused greater trauma in bilateral relations than the twentieth century. After Japan's four-decade long colonial occupation of Korea, the two countries took two decades just to establish diplomatic relations. Subsequent interactions have remained seriously compromised by the memory of colonialism. This article reviews the tensions behind the tempestuous bilateral relationship, focusing on the depiction of Japan's wartime past in school textbooks. We advance three suggestions for reconciliation: viewing reconciliation not as the restoration of a harmonious pre-conflict order, but as an ongoing, incomplete process; expanding promising bilateral dialogues; and accepting that there will always be differences between Korea and Japan, most notably with regard to representations of the past. Rather than being an inevitable source of conflict, these differences should contribute to an ongoing process of negotiation between the two neighbors.