The Imjin War (78 page)

The Korean government at this time was as divided as ever by fac
tional strife, each camp more concerned with besting its political rivals than in forming a coherent foreign policy to replace Seoul’s now-defunct reliance on isolation. There were three nodes of power on the scene: King Kojong, who came to the throne in 1864 by way of adoption into the royal house; the young man’s birth father, the Taewongun, who had served as regent until Kojong’s recent coming of age; and Kojong’s wife, Queen Min, backed by her influential family. At first the Taewongun and his group took a reactionary, antiforeign stance, pulling King Kojong in one direction while Queen Min’s promodernization, pro-Japan camp pulled him in another. This lasted until the reactionaries attacked the Japanese legation in Seoul, giving the Japanese an excuse to send troops to Korea to protect their citizens, and in turn forcing China to remove the Taewongun before his followers provided Tokyo with any further cause to intervene. By the time the Taewongun was allowed to return to Seoul in 1885, he had reversed himself to support Japan, and Queen Min had in turn become anti-Japanese, a move that would lead to her murder ten years later in a Japanese-incited palace attack. King Kojong, meanwhile, remained caught in the middle, turning alternately to the Russians, the British, and the Americans for advice.

In 1894 the Tonghak peasant uprising gave both the Japanese and the Chinese cause to send additional forces to
Korea, the Japanese to safeguard their growing interests, the Chinese in response to a call for help from Seoul. After a quarter century of modernization, Japan was now feeling confident of its position on the peninsula and of its ability to challenge Qing China, which was by this time sinking into a morass of corruption, mismanagement, and weakness. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 was the result. Mobilizing just eight thousand ground troops and twenty-one small but modern warships, the Japanese efficiently crushed Qing army units at Pyongyang, sank several Chinese ships in the northern reaches of the Yellow Sea, and went on to seize the Liaodong Peninsula on China’s eastern border. In the treaty that ended the war in April 1895, China relinquished its age-old influence over Korea by declaring the nation independent, handed over to Japan the island of Taiwan, and agreed to pay a huge indemnity, a promise that it would have to borrow heavily from the West to fulfill.

The Sino-Japanese War placed the Qing dynasty on its final slide to oblivion. In the aftermath of the conflict, Britain, Russia, and Germany, awakened to the true extent of China’s weakness, began demanding trade concessions and territorial leases that Beijing was powerless to refuse, “cutting up the Chinese melon” into semi-colonial spheres of influence. The Qing dynasty, the last dynasty to govern
China after more than two millennia of imperial rule, eventually collapsed in 1912, replaced first by a shaky republic, then by a prolonged period of civil war.

Japan
, meanwhile, emerged from the war with a tremendous surge of self-confidence and pride. It had successfully taken its first real step toward colonial expansion with the acquisition of Taiwan and had established itself as the leading state in East Asia—and in turn a rising challenge to Russia. The tsar’s empire, which during Hideyoshi’s time did not extend much beyond the Ural Mountains, now stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean, bringing Russia’s colonial ambitions into conflict with Japan. Tokyo initially sought to avoid a conflict with its giant neighbor by acquiescing to Moscow’s demand that it return the Liaodong Peninsula to China, ostensibly for the sake of preserving peace in the region. In fact Russia wanted the peninsula for itself; it needed an ice-free port on its Pacific side, and the Liaodong Peninsula had two. The issue was finally settled in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 from which Japan once again emerged the unexpected victor, thereby establishing itself as a bona fide great power.

By this time
Japan had won the admiration and respect of many in the West. It was seen as a model of Asian modernization and good government, with all the qualities necessary to lead its less developed Asian neighbors to “enlightenment” through benevolent colonial rule. In a 1904 report to Washington, American minister to Korea Horace Allen observed that “These people [the Koreans] cannot govern themselves. They must have an overlord as they have had for all time.... Let Japan have Korea outright if she can get it.... I am no pro-Japanese enthusiast, as you know, but neither am I opposed to any civilized race taking over the management of these kindly Asiatics for the good of the people and the suppression of oppressive officials, the establishment of order and the development of commerce.”
[870]
In the following year Ameri
can journalist George Kennan added his two cents: “There is now in progress in the Far East a social and political experiment which, in point of interest and importance, is not surpassed, I think, by anything of the kind recorded in history. For the first time in the annals of the East, one Asiatic nation is making a serious and determined effort to transform and civilize another.... It is a gigantic experiment, and it may or may not succeed; but we, who are trying a similar experiment in the Philippines, must regard it with the deepest interest and sympathy.”
[871]

In 1905
Korea was made a protectorate of Japan to the general acquiescence or approval of the great Western powers. The Koreans, like the Taiwanese ten years before, tried to resist, even forming “righteous armies” as they had during the Imjin War. All such efforts were brutally suppressed by the Japanese at a cost of nearly twelve thousand Korean lives. In 1910 Tokyo annexed the peninsula outright.

By siding with the allies in
World War I, Japan was able to add a few more bits and pieces to its empire by seizing former German possessions in the Far East, the treaty port of Qingdao on China’s eastern coast, plus a number of Pacific islands. This marked the end of Japan’s first expansionist phase, when it built an empire during the age of imperialism by following the example and abiding by the rules of the West. Tokyo’s thirst for territory, however, remained unquenched. With the government coming increasing under military control, Japan went on to seize Manchuria and a large portion of eastern China in 1931–32. Then, beginning on December 7, 1941, it made a grab for the Western world’s Asian colonial possessions, bringing it first and foremost into conflict with the United States. It was a contest Japan could not, and would not, win.

At its point of greatest wartime expansion in 1942,
Japan’s empire extended across Korea, Manchuria, eastern China, Indochina, Southeast Asia, and much of the South Pacific. It was the same territory Toyotomi Hideyoshi had set out to conquer back in 1592.

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After a period of estrangement following World War II, a myriad of economic, diplomatic, cultural, and educational ties began to develop between
Korea and Japan, binding the two nations together in a relationship that is today closer than at any time in the past. Tensions, however, have not disappeared. The largest source of contention remains Japan’s occupation of the peninsula from 1905 to 1945 and its actions in World War II, when Korean men were conscripted as slave labor for wartime industries and women were forced into prostitution as “comfort women” for the empire’s troops. The Koreans want apologies and compensation, more than the Japanese are willing to give. Conflicts also regularly arise over how each nation views their shared history. Beginning in 1982, the way history was being taught to Japanese students came under harsh criticism by both the Koreans and Chinese, they charging that new textbooks introduced into the schools attempted to rationalize and sugarcoat Japan’s militaristic past, primarily its conduct in World War II, but also during Hideyoshi’s invasion of the mainland four hundred years before. Tokyo has ordered limited changes to the controversial textbooks over the years and has tried to appear more sensitive in the eyes of the world. But it has not done enough as far as the Koreans are concerned. They continue to urge the Japanese to acknowledge their “past wrongdoings” and to teach history “objectively through balanced descriptions which take into account the views of their neighbors.”
[872]
Some Japanese are sympathetic to these concerns. Others counter that
Seoul is merely using the textbook issue for diplomatic and economic gain, or that the whole thing is a bugbear that Korea’s opposition leaders like to throw into the political arena to put pressure on the party in power.
[873]

Yet another source of disagreement between Korea and Japan is the mimizuka in Kyoto, the misnamed “ear tomb” where the tens of thousands of noses that Hideyoshi’s troops cut off during the Imjin War were subsequently interred. In 1990 a Korean Buddhist monk named Pak Sam-jung traveled to Kyoto and, with the support of a private local organization, conducted a ceremony in front of the tomb to comfort the spirits residing there and guide them home to Korea. Over the next six years the Japanese organization that hosted this event spearheaded a drive to get the mimizuka itself sent home, submitting a petition bearing twenty thousand signatures to Kyoto city officials, and pledging to bear the cost of excavating the contents of the tomb and shipping them to Korea, together with the nine-meter-high earthen mound and the stone pagoda on top. When Pak Sam-jung returned to Kyoto in 1996, the tomb’s return seemed imminent. “These noses were cut off as trophies of war for Toyotomi Hideyoshi,” he announced upon leaving Seoul. “They have been there in Kyoto for four hundred years. It is now our duty to see them returned to Korea to assuage the grief of the 126,000 people whose remains are buried there.”
[874]

In the end the necessary permission to move the mimizuka was not forthcoming from the Japanese government. It was decided that, as an officially designated national cultural asset, the tomb should stay where it was. It remains in
Kyoto to this day, little known and not often visited, and not well marked for tourists. It is just west of Kyoto National Museum and Toyokuni Jinja, the Shinto shrine dedicated to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was deified as a kami after his death. Funding from the government is insufficient to care for the site, so the work is done by local residents, who volunteer to cut the grass and tidy up the grounds.
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