South Korea marks a painful centenary

By Ronan Thomas

March 26, 1910. Lushun, northeast China. A mustachioed 30-year-old Korean nationalist, Catholic convert and self-styled resistance fighter waits silently in his prison cell. His Japanese guards keep close watch. Their prisoner is special. He has been sentenced to death for a political assassination one year earlier in Harbin, Manchuria, which shocked North Asia and enraged Japan. The Korean finishes a written treatise calling for Pan-Asian political unity and Christian solidarity before he is led out, with three others, to face a hangman's rope. The prisoner's name: Ahn Jung-geun (1879-1910). His victim: Hirobumi Ito (1841-1909), four times Japanese prime minister, eminence grise of Japan's 19th century Meiji Restoration reforms and hated former Japanese colonial administrator in Korea.

Ahn's execution - in the Chinese port city formerly known as Port Arthur - still resonates in Northeast Asia. The interwoven fates of Ahn and Ito continue to complicate Korean and Japanese relations today. A century on, a complex legacy persists.

On October 26 this year, a memorial museum dedicated to Ahn's life and death opens in Seoul. A four storey building - 12 expensive neo-modernist glass rectangles complete with statue-lined approach - is nearing completion and will replace an older, more modest memorial hall in the capital's Namsan Park district.

It will be an event of rich symbolism in South Korea, a clear demonstration of how it wants its history to be viewed by the outside world - and who it considers its heroes to be. When the museum opens, it will be attended by senior South Korean politicians, historians and several of Ahn's relatives. Elsewhere in South Korea, the centenary of Ahn's execution will be marked by new TV documentaries, conferences and other exhibitions.

As ever, bilateral passions and conflicting Korean/Japanese historical interpretations of Ahn's fate won't be far behind. Both nations view Ito's assassination and Ahn's execution through diametrically-opposed prisms. In South Korea, "Patriot Ahn" is feted as a near saint, an archetypal resistance fighter and rallying figurehead. For most South Koreans, Ahn is the man who rid his country of an oppressive colonial persecutor with Korean blood on his hands. For some Japanese academics and sections of their country's media, Ahn remains a terrorist, a distasteful murderer of one of their country's leading reformist statesmen. Opinions of both men remain, on the whole, entrenched in both countries, the result of decades of Korean/Japanese animosity. It is highly unlikely in 2010 that either side will compromise on these central issues of national identity.

There are other reasons for ongoing mutual recrimination. This year also marks another emotional centenary for South Korea - Japan's full annexation of Korea in August 1910, when Tokyo began its imposition of a nightmare occupation and brutalization of Korea's people and culture until 1945. What is more, South Koreans are also noting that the events of 1910 took place not just because of Japanese territorial rapaciousness, but also with the diplomatic connivance of the international Great Powers of the age. For these countries, Korea's fate was seen as a sideshow. It was abandoned, by the stroke of a pen, to Japan's tender mercies. With this shared grievance, Ito Hirobumi, Ahn Jung-geun and the diplomatic iniquities of 1910 are receiving fresh regional attention.

To understand today's ongoing pain and pride in Korea it is worth recalling how the fates of both men collided in 1909-1910 as well as the fractious context of North East Asian geopolitics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Manchurian assassination
Ahn Jung-guen's execution in 1910 was the culmination of a short, tumultuous life. He fitted the profile of many Koreans politicized against Japanese expansionism from 1905 onwards. A skilled calligrapher, with aspirations to be teacher, Ahn came from the town of Haeju (in today's North Korea).

He had been politically active against the Japanese early. His conversion to Catholicism in 1895 played a key role, but he was also outraged by the failure of successive Korean governments to prevent Japanese subversion of his country's national sovereignty. A modernizer by instinct, he nevertheless also recognized that the West's own colonial activities were inimical to Korea's national interests.

Ahn favored Pan-Asian political and economic reforms which would preserve his nation's distinct identity whilst rooting it in a hoped-for Christian Asian future. He even admired many of the great Meiji reforms undertaken by the Japanese from 1868. After 1905, his thinking evolved - to include assassination. The key moment for Ahn seems to have been Japan's imposition of a "protectorate" over Korea in 1905 and the arrival of former Japanese prime minister Hirobumi Ito as resident general - de facto colonial governor - in Seoul. He convinced himself that Korea's very identity was at stake and he must act.

Forced into exile in the Russian far east in 1908, Ahn conspired as part of a 12-member Korean nationalist cell. In an act of solidarity with the sufferings of the Korean people, this group hatched a plot to assassinate key Japanese figureheads. To demonstrate their commitment, each of the conspirators cut off their little fingers with knives in 1909, daubing a Korean national flag in blood with the inscription "Liberate Korea".

Ahn himself planned Ito's killing meticulously; he had been tracking his movements since late 1908. By October 1909, Ito had served four years as resident general in Seoul and had resigned to work on a new portfolio in Japan's privy council. But as a regional expert, Ito was still active in negotiations with Russia on Korean and Manchurian issues, particularly the financial implications of dividing Manchuria into new spheres of influence. The following year, Ahn set his plans in final motion.

He travelled south into Manchuria, in 1909 a hotbed of competing attempts by Tsarist Russia and Meiji-era Japan to control railway networks and access to strategic sea ports. Apprised that Ito would arrive by train at the Russian-controlled city of Harbin, Inner Manchuria, Ahn walked into the main railway station on October 26. In his pocket, he carried a loaded pistol and a folded Korean national flag. At 9am, a train pulled into the platform in front of him. Russian sentries paced past; briefcase-carrying Japanese bureaucrats flitted in and out of the carriages.

As the Korean watched intently, a 68-year old bearded figure left the train and walked toward a group of assembled Russian and Japanese dignitaries. Seizing the moment, the younger man fired four shots at close range, inflicting fatal wounds. Before he was bundled to the ground by shocked Russian guards, Ahn shouted for Korea's liberation from Japanese oppression and waved the Korean flag in defiance. The dying Ito, when told that his assailant was Korean, muttered, "He is a fool."

In the following months, Ito received a full state funeral in Tokyo, whilst Russian authorities in Harbin handed Ahn over to a Japanese civil court in Lushun. At his trial, Ahn stated his motives. Ito was responsible for 15 "crimes", primarily his colonial activities in Seoul. As such, he deserved to die as the "oppressor-in chief of the Korean nation". Ahn was convicted and subsequently executed on March 26, 1910, and his remains were buried in unmarked ground in Lushun. In the succeeding decades, his grave was built over by construction projects of the People's Republic of China. In 2010, the governments of South Korea, Japan and China are still arguing about the exact location and repatriation of Ahn's remains.

Ahn's pistol shots echoed around Northeast Asia. They caused a regional sensation although only a brief flicker of interest in international diplomatic chancelleries. If Japan had lost an elder statesman and key regional negotiator, Korea had gained a national hero.

Ito, champion of the Meiji
Ito's death at Harbin station was a shocking conclusion to a life dedicated to his country's domestic and international public service. By the time he died, he had established a reputation as one of Japan's most influential 19th century politicians and as a prime minister who had served an impressive four terms.

Born in 1841, at the tail end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Ito came from a low-ranking samurai background. But his willingness to embrace Western ideas and his adroit political maneuvering in the 1870s and 1880s propelled him to the highest ranks of Japanese politics. So much so that Ito retains a reputation in Japan as a leading economic and political modernizer (as well as for a philandering private life). Ito enjoyed a prestigious Japanese and Western education. In 1863, after working his passage westwards aboard a steamship, he attended Britain's elite University College London. Entranced by London's modernity, he devoured the city's vibrant and raucous free press, encountered Britain's boundless popular confidence in monarchy and empire and witnessed the opening of the world's first underground railway system - the Tube. From his very first encounter with the West, Ito yearned for similar marvels for Japan.

Returning home, Ito drew on his family connections and membership of Japan's oligarchical class. He was recruited to the Japanese civil service and became an obsessive advocate for introducing Western market principles into Japan's traditional society. Ito's ambitions for Japan mirrored a period of unprecedented change in Japan's economic and political life - the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912). During this period, Japan drank deeply from the well of Western ideas and technological development.

Japan emerged from centuries of isolation, determined to carve for itself a new, respected, position in the world by mimicking the best the West had to offer. As both architect and champion of the Meiji reforms, Ito was convinced that Japan could better the Great Powers of the age - Britain, France, Russia and the two rising industrial colossi, Germany and the United States. In 1871-3, Ito took part in the famous Iwakura Mission, a two-year fact-finding mission to Europe and the United States that aimed to identify Western economic and political strengths and distil them into an elixir for Japan's own consumption.

It was the ultimate "best practices" research project. The mission concluded that the West's global leadership in the 1870s was not due to innate superiority but rather the happy coincidence of key Western political and economic reforms made during 1800-1840, backed up by imperial aspiration and technological innovation. If the West could achieve such wonders in only 40 years, the mission's report suggested, Japan could do the same. Japan might leapfrog the competition, as it were - but only if it possessed the necessary national will and fortitude. It was a powerful message for Japan's new generation of political reformers. Ito was a prime mover in implementing the Iwakura conclusions. As an up-and-coming reformist, he rose rapidly through the Japanese government hierarchy from the late 1870s. He was to become Japan's master imitator.

The Meiji reforms roared into life. Urged on by Ito and his colleagues, Japan began the process of full-Western style industrialization. The foundations would be threefold. First, Japan advocated protective tariffs to build its own resources. Second, it launched a policy of British and American-style aggressive free-trade market economics. Third, Ito turned to rising Germany for the latest in political and economic thinking. In 1882-83, he travelled to Berlin, where he was hugely impressed by Prussia's political constitution and Germany's model of economics/politics and scientific development. He identified closely with Germany's own restless desire for a "place in the sun".

Elected prime minister for the first time in 1885, Ito immediately established Western-style cabinet and civil service models. He went on to draft the radical Meiji Constitution (1889) and established Tokyo's first Diet (bicameral legislature) in 1890. Ito's Meiji Constitution was not a truly democratic document. Nevertheless, by enshrining the Western ideas of wider political participation, freedom of religion and freedom of the press, it was a revolutionary step-change beyond Japan's previous semi-feudal polity.

Ito's successes as a Meiji reformist equipped him for four terms as Japan's prime minister (1885-1888, 1892-1896, 1898 and 1900-1901). His reputation as an international statesman grew, as did his conviction that Western models must be emulated to Japan's advantage. In 1897, he attended Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in London, noting their splendor and the virtues enjoyed by a first rank imperial power. It was a path which Japan would also imitate - disastrously - during the 20th century.

In 1901, Ito's international achievements were further recognized in the award of an honorary doctorate by Yale University. His career winding down, Ito resigned as premier the same year. He had witnessed his country's growing economic, political and military power and signs of Japan's rising regional territorial confidence and ambitions. His attentions now turned toward Korea.

After designing the administrative structures for a euphemistically-named "protectorate" of Korea, Ito was appointed as Japan's first resident general in Seoul from 1905-1909. His first instincts were to introduce gradualist reforms, but his solutions soon became authoritarian as Korean resistance acts multiplied. Japan's forced embrace of Korea tightened. Drawing on experience honed in his successive Meiji governments, Ito developed mechanisms for a fully fledged Japanese colonial government in Seoul. He disbanded the Korean army, set up a feared internal police force, appointed a compliant Korean political cabinet, and in 1907 cynically forced the abdication of Korean monarch Gojong in favor of his son, angering many Koreans, including Ahn.

Ito - elevated to the status of prince in 1907 - became a hated figurehead. He did not see full annexation for Korea by the end of the decade as inevitable, but by 1909 the rising tide of internal opposition meant it was much more likely. With the key structures for a future Japanese administration for Korea firmly in place by 1909, Ito relinquished his post for an active advisory role in the Japanese Privy Council.

Nemesis and the train to Harbin were fast approaching.

South Korea marks a painful centenary
By Ronan Thomas

A nation engulfed
The fates of Ahn and Ito did not take place in isolation. As individuals, they were acting in a wider geopolitical game between the international Great Powers, leading indirectly to Korea's loss of sovereignty in 1905 and complete annexation in 1910.

By the first years of the new 20th century, Japan's strategic calculations, forged under the Meiji, had shifted toward outright regional expansionism. Korea was to be the main course on its menu.

Northeast Asia in the early 20th century was a veritable shark's pool. Ailing powers such as Qing Dynasty China and Chosun Dynasty Korea faced the full aspirant power of resurgent Japan, turbo-charged by the Meiji Restoration and a sense of manifest destiny in the world. The international Great Powers of the age - Britain, France, Tsarist Russia, Germany and the United States - all viewed East Asia competitively in terms of regional influence (a phenomenon dubbed by contemporary Asians as the "White Peril").

In the latter Meiji period, Japan won the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) against China, gaining Formosa (present-day Taiwan) and the nearby Pescadores (now Penghu) islands. But, humiliatingly, Japan was forced under international censure to hand them back. By 1900, Japan was looking elsewhere, eyeing the Korean peninsula hungrily. Since the mid-1890s, Japanese politicians had been describing Korea as a "security risk" to their country, ripe to fall under Western influence. General Jakob Meckel, Prussian military advisor to the Japanese Imperial Army went further, helpfully asserting that Korea was "a dagger thrust at the heart of Japan". Japan also viewed its joint venture investments in Korea - railway networks and a thriving bilateral trade by 1900 - in increasingly proprietary terms.

By 1905, Japanese strategic thinking hardened. The Korean peninsula was to be part of its "line of advantage", a geopolitical perspective akin to Nazi Germany's later "Lebensraum" (living space) policies. In other words, Japan favored a land grab strategy aimed at Japanese regional dominance to include Korea and parts of Manchuria. It was an utterly self-serving policy that paved the way for decades of Korean and Chinese suffering. Japanese policymakers in 1905 felt entirely justified in such thinking. After all, they reasoned, if colonial powers such as Britain, France and Germany could annex vast swathes of Africa during the 1880s and 1890s, then why not Japan in its own region?

Korea was also politically weak. Successive sclerotic Korean governments of its later Chosun period faced "progressive" domestic opposition forces agitating for closer ties with Japan and prepared to destabilize their own country to achieve it.

Regional events increased the external threat to Korea. In 1904-05, everything changed for Japan. Its stunning victories against Russia on land and sea in the Russo-Japanese War redrew the regional strategic balance dramatically. Under the Treaty of Portsmouth (September 1905), signed in New Hampshire, USA, and mediated by US President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, the Great Powers sought to put in place new political and territorial arrangements protecting their regional interests after a bruising regional conflict. These arrangements would be bad news for Korea.

The Portsmouth Treaty signatories acquiesced in Japanese demands not only for new leases on the Liaotung Peninsula in Manchuria and new control rights over southern Manchurian railways but also for their own "protectorate" - over Korea. With Russia facing popular revolution in 1905, China languishing as a weakened regional actor and Japan basking in new military confidence, the signatories convinced themselves that Korea's national rights mattered less than regional stability. In the Taft-Katsura discussions (of July 1905), the US had also appeared to countenance Japanese control over Korea if the latter endorsed the US sphere of influence in the Philippines (extant since 1898).

Encouraged by the Portsmouth Treaty, Japan began preparations for outright control of the entire Korean peninsula. The reasons for international acceptance of its actions were fairly self-evident. The locus of international diplomatic calculation in 1905 placed Korea firmly on the periphery. Korea was viewed by the Great Powers not in moral terms but in terms of Realpolitik, in other words, Korea counted for little when compared with the need for wider regional security.

Besides, the Great Powers had other, increasingly pressing concerns of their own that eclipsed the fate of Korea - the maintenance of their intricate web of national alliances and global interests, each designed to check-mate the others' international power positions. As the 1900s progressed, Britain, France and Russia, concluding that the rising power of Germany in Europe and overseas represented the greatest threat to their respective national securities, forged the so-called Triple Entente, of which the Entente Cordiale (1904) between Britain and France, and the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907 were key pillars.

Ranged against them, Germany in turn led the Triple Alliance (1882) of herself, Austro-Hungary and Italy. In the years from 1905 the clock began to count down slowly, but steadily, towards the World War I. Britain and Germany had already begun a costly naval arms race from 1904, each seeking to outdo the other in battleship construction. Franco-German colonial tensions also began to rise (they would reach dangerous levels in the Agadir Crisis over Morocco in 1911). In Asia, Britain and Japan had signed a strategic alliance in 1902 initially to safeguard against Russian expansion. Renewed in 1905 and 1911, this agreement further sought to endorse both countries regional territorial interests. For Britain this meant India, for Japan, Korea.

All of this meant that, from 1905, Japan was given a free hand in Korea, untroubled by significant international censure or opposition.

Mediated by Hirobumi Ito, Japan forced Korea to accept the notorious Eulsa Treaty in November 1905 - backed up by Imperial Japanese Army jackboots - whereby Korea became a formal Japanese protectorate. This was followed by the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty (1907), increasing Japan's hold still further on the peninsula. Ahn's actions at Harbin two years later may have removed a hated figurehead but they did little to halt Japan's salami slicing. Nor did they advance the cause of Korean independence in the short term. On August 22, 1910, without international opposition, Japan finally forced through the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty (1910).

Korea disappeared as a sovereign nation for 35 years.

It endured a brutal occupation. Through repressive policies, Japan attempted to eradicate Korean culture, history, architecture and language, turning Korea into a "Japanized" vassal state. Japanese actions burned hatred deep into the Korean national soul. The effects over the following decades were profound. In 1919, a Korean popular revolt was crushed, mercilessly. In the 1920s and 1930s, colonial-style Japanese architecture sprouted across Seoul. Thousands of Koreans were tortured or killed and their lands appropriated.

Some resisted with the utmost heroism, others collaborated. Korean children were indoctrinated in a repressive system which ordered total obedience to Japan. During World War II, over two million Koreans were conscripted to serve as slave labor in Japan and the Pacific Islands. Around 100,000 Korean "comfort women" were forced into Japanese military brothels. Some 40,000 Korean youths were inducted into the Japanese Army - along with thousands of Taiwanese - and subjected to harsh Japanese training methods. In many cases, the indoctrination worked only too well. Brutalized by the Japanese, some Korean soldiers inflicted unconscionable suffering themselves.

Indeed, Korean guards acquired a reputation as particularly savage in their treatment of British Empire prisoners of war and Asian forced laborers on Japan's notorious "Death Railway" projects along the Burma (Myanmar) -Thailand border during 1942-1945. Memoir after memoir of Allied soldiers imprisoned in the Far East attests that Korean camp guards were among the very worst. A precise comparison may be made with those Ukrainian guards who served alongside the SS in Nazi concentration camps in Europe.

Legacy issues
South Korea has been unpicking the effects of Japan's cruel embrace (and praising Ahn's actions) ever since. The 1910-45 period holds, arguably, as powerful a place in South Korean national consciousness as the Korean War of 1950-53 - the 60th anniversary of which also falls this year.

As a result, Korea has been actively purging what it sees as a shameful past. During 1995-96, South Korean engineers demolished the loathed Seoul Capitol building, Japan's 1926 colonial headquarters. The basement of this building had been used to torture Korean resistance fighters, both Christian and communist. Even as late as 1998, South Korea maintained a ban on Japanese cars and other imported products. For many South Koreans, the pain of 1910-45 still lies just below the surface. Scratch it and old resentments can rapidly emerge. This is less apparent among Koreans aged under 25, many of whom today engage fully in a vibrant cultural and national sporting interchange with Japan's own youth. But for many older Koreans, memories of the occupation are still incendiary.

Many are rightly angered by Japan's institutional amnesia toward the World War II period. Korean academics complain frequently that Japan does not cooperate in the sharing of occupation-era documents. Several key Japanese school history books treat Korea's 20th century suffering selectively rather than as an objective indictment of Japanese actions. Public visits by leading Japanese politicians to Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine (which venerates several Japanese war criminals) make matters worse. In 2001, a group of South Koreans imitated Ahn Jung-guen by mutilating their fingers in public in protest at a visit to the shrine by Japanese Prime Minister Junichuro Koizumi.

Ahn's and Ito's fates also pose several unsettling and still relevant questions a century on. Some are universal and philosophical, others specific to Asia. These include the perennial dilemma of when exactly it is morally justifiable, if at all, to assassinate a political leader. And if so should it take place under conditions of proven tyranny or to preempt one about to arrive?

Ahn's actions in 1909 can be compared to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip in June 1914. Or the assassination of senior Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942. Heydrich, the vicious "Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia" was murdered by two British-trained Czech patriots who similarly wished to free their country from foreign oppression. These men had few doubts and paid, like Ahn, with their lives. Today, their acts are seen by most modern historians as entirely laudable. There are other historical parallels.

What if Ito's British contemporary, William Ewart Gladstone - a towering Victorian politician who likewise served four terms as his country's prime minister - had been assassinated by, say, an Irish Fenian nationalist in the 1880s? The issues for both countries would have been exactly the same. For them, as with Ito Hirobumi and Ahn Jung-guen, historical objectivity is a precious commodity. It remains a matter of contrasting national perspectives.

At the same time, both Ito and Ahn shared concerns still highly relevant today in Asia. Both men favored Pan-Asian economic and political unity in the face of competition from Western powers. Ito favored a Meiji-style "unity" under a Japanese umbrella, presaging the Japanese imperialism of the 1930s and its defeat in 1945. Ahn's Pan-Asian aspirations were based both on his Catholic morality and pride in his country. But for Ahn it was the fact of actual oppression per se that counted, not geopolitical calculation.

Given Japan's gross behavior toward Korea from 1910-1945, Ahn's is still a powerful argument, even the clinching one. Today, the debate on Pan-Asian unity is as elusive as ever. Whilst there have been attempts, including the efforts of the Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) Plus 3 grouping (the 10 members of ASEAN plus China, Japan and South Korea), the Asia Conference and plans for a pan-Asian single currency (similar to the euro), none of these ideas have yet found fruition. Realization of Ahn's hopes are as elusive as ever.

So South Korea's new Ahn museum will open this October amidst powerful historical and contemporary cross currents. If a museum may be said to embody those things a nation most values, then the Ahn building will likely prove a popular educational attraction in Seoul. Like the US Holocaust and Victims of Communism Memorial Museums in Washington, the Ahn museum will seek to explain gross 20th century human atrocities. One thing is certain. As important actors during one of the darkest chapters of Korean and Japanese history, Patriot Ahn and Ito, Champion of the Meiji, will not be forgotten in North Asia, even with another century's passing.

Ronan Thomas is a British correspondent. He was based in Seoul during the 1990s.

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