Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910

POPULIST

COLLABORATORS

The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese

Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910

Yumi Moon

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS   ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Author’s Note

Introduction

1. The Korean Reformers and the Late Chosŏn State

2. People and Foreigners: The Northwestern Provinces,

1896–1904

3. Sensational Campaigns: The Russo-Japanese War and

the Ilchinhoe’s Rise, 1904–1905

4. Freedom and the New Look: The Culture and Rhetoric

of the Ilchinhoe Movement

5. The Populist Contest: The Ilchinhoe’s Tax Resistance,

1904–1907

6. Subverting Local Society: Ilchinhoe Legal Disputes,

1904–1907

7. The Authoritarian Resolution: The Ilchinhoe

and the Japanese, 1904–1910

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

A few choices, made without imagining their long-term results, have shaped my life. I wrote this book with deep sympathy for people who tried hard to change their lives but became bewildered by the progress of history. Luckily, many good people have helped me survive the results of my choices, whether made from innocence or from ignorance. I must first thank my teachers. Carter Eckert, my advisor at Harvard, gave me both intellectual inspiration and space to grow as a historian. He recognized the importance of my work beyond what any graduate student might dream of receiving from her advisor and never failed to express his confidence in my academic capability. With his continuous encouragement, valuable criticism, and warm personal advice, I was able to withstand my difficult moments at Harvard and subsequently at Stanford. I also thank Edward Baker, who admitted me as the Harvard-Yenching visiting fellow and gave me the chance to begin a new academic career in the United States. His support and understanding provided breathing space during my years at Harvard. Sun Joo Kim has guided me with her academic expertise, her exemplary career as a Korean historian, and her warmth and wisdom. She included my work in her conference panels and in her book and also contributed detailed comments on drafts of chapters for this book. Andrew Gordon introduced me to modern Japanese history and amazed me with his academic rigor and precision. Due to his criticism and advice, I was able to rethink my work in the historiography of the Japanese Empire. Iriye Akira let me audit his courses in international history, read my research, and acknowledged its academic contribution with encouragement. Sugata Bose introduced me to the major debates on colonialism and postcolonialism in the history of South Asia. I also thank Albert Craig for his teaching in Meiji history, Milan Hejtmanek for igniting my interest in the history of the Chosŏn dynasty, Bernard Bailyn for his course on methodology in history, and Daniel Botsman, Mikael Adolphson, and the late Harold Bolitho in the Japanese history seminar for their criticism at the earliest stage of my research. It is a blessing that I have been able to continue my academic communication with my advisors at Seoul National University. I especially thank Yong-chool Ha, Young-sun Ha, Jung-woon Choi, and Young-kwan Yoon for their teaching and personal encouragement.

Many colleagues at Stanford University and elsewhere read the drafts of this book and gave me valuable comments. Kyung Moon Hwang, Kyu Hyun Kim, Andre Schmid, and Theodore Jun Yoo read the manuscript and offered criticisms and suggestions for revising it. Thanks to the advice of Matt Sommer, I was able to organize a seminar at Stanford on a draft of the book. Mark Lewis, Tom Mullaney, Gi-Wook Shin, Matt Sommer, Jun Uchida, and Kären Wigen joined the seminar and helped me with their insightful questions and comments. Peter Duus kindly read my manuscript and suggested key areas where it could be improved. My departmental mentors at Stanford, Gordon Chang, Estelle Freedman, and David Holloway, guided my professional development with knowledge and thoughtfulness. I also must mention the colleagues who wrote letters for my permanent residency to the U.S. Immigration Office: Nam Hee Lee and Clark Sorenson, as well as Carter Eckert, Kyung Moon Hwang, Theodore Jun Yoo, and Kyu Hyun Kim. Professors Tae-Gyun Park, Kun-sik Chung, and Yong-uk Chung at Seoul National University aided my research or introduced me to important scholars during my visits to Seoul. The two anonymous readers for Cornell University Press gave me valuable comments to make my manuscript conceptually more coherent. I also benefited from anonymous reviewers for the American Historical Review, whose comments on my article have been incorporated into the introduction and other chapters of this book. I also learned a lot from the discussants and audiences at my various presentations at Association for Asian Studies annual meetings, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of British Columbia, Seoul National University, and the University of Southern California, and at the University of Washington in Seattle and Princeton University. Stanford students in my course on colonialism and collaboration helped me clarify my arguments on collaboration and surprised me with their sincere interest in the subject.

I also miss and thank my fellow students during my graduate years. Many of them are now teaching at academic institutions. They include Chong Bum Kim, Jiwon Shin, Jin K. Robertson, Mark Byington, Hyung Gu Lynn, John Frankl, Eugene Park, Tae Yang Kwak, Jungwon Kim, Sue Jean Cho, Izumi Nakayama, Emer O’Dwyer, Yoichi Nakano, Marjan Boogert, Chiho Sawada, the late Scott Swaner, and many others. Among them, Michael Kim read my research and offered sharp critiques and editing suggestions. The Korean staff at the Harvard-Yenching Library, Choong Nam Yoon, Seunghi Paek, and Hyang Lee, always responded to my requests with kindness. Dr. Kyungmi Chun, the Korean librarian at Stanford, established the Korea Collection from scratch and allowed me to continue my work with ease. K. E. Duffin, my writing advisor at Harvard, and Victoria R. M. Scott, my current editor, have made my English prose more readable. I especially thank Victoria for answering urgent last-minute requests with generosity and professionalism. Roger Haydon at Cornell University Press has been a wonderful editor. I am grateful for his intelligence and judgment.

Throughout my academic journey to date, my work life has relied completely on the patience and assistance of my family. My husband has endured our unusual married life with compassion and responsibility. My two children have patiently borne their mom’s long working hours and absence from school field trips and the like. I hope they understand my love for them and my struggles to be home with them. Throughout my years in the United States, my parents have always remained on my side, listening to my dreams and worries. My mother has been the ultimate source of support in overcoming frustrations and moving on. This book is dedicated to her for her inspiration and love.

Parts of this book have been published earlier in my Immoral Rights: Korean Populist Reformers and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, American Historical Review 118, no. 1 (February 2013); Minkwŏn kwa Cheguk: Kukwŏn Sangsilgi Minkwŏn Kaenyŏm ŭi Yongpŏp kwa Pyŏnhwa, 1896–1910 (Rights and Empire: The Concept of Popular Rights and Its Changes during the Period of the Great Korean Empire, 1896–1910), in Ha Yŏng-sŏn and Son Yŏl, eds., Kŭndae Han’guk ŭi Sahoe Kwahak Kaenyŏm Hyŏngsŏngsa (The History of Social Science Concepts in Modern Korea), vol. 2 (Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa Pip’yŏngsa, 2012); and From Periphery to a Transnational Frontier: Popular Movements in the Northwestern Provinces, 1896–1904, in Sun Joo Kim, ed., The Northern Region of Korea: History, Identity, and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). I am thankful to the publishers and editors of the article and the book chapters for allowing me to use their contents in this book.

Abbreviations

Author’s Note

Romanization of Korean follows the McCune-Reischauer system. The Royal Treasury of Korea refers to the Naejangwŏn from 1895 and 1905 and to the Kyŏngniwŏn from March 1905 to December 1907. The title of Kojong changed from king to emperor after October 1897, the beginning of the Great Korean Empire. The records of the Korean government followed the Gregorian calendar after January 1896.

INTRODUCTION

The Scandals of Pro-Japanese

Collaboration in 2004

In March 2004, almost sixty years after the nation’s liberation in 1945, the South Korean national assembly passed a law, in the name of purification of the nation’s history (kwagŏsa ch’ŏngsan), for the purpose of investigating pro-Japanese acts during colonial rule.¹ Unexpectedly, the act provoked a series of scandals that shattered the political prospects of prominent ruling party leaders. Sin Ki-nam, the chair of Yŏllin Uri Party at the time, featured in the most dramatic and excruciating case. Sin initiated a committee for truth, reconciliation, and the future on August 1, 2004, saying that the problems of the past were not personal but a long-delayed historical issue. Since the democratic and reformist party rules the national assembly, we should clear the issues and move forward.² As a moderate, Sin proudly reiterated that his father had earned a national honor for his contribution to subduing the Communist partisans during the Korean War. However, one citizen had voiced suspicion about Sin’s father’s past on a political website, Chinbonuri (The Progressive World), on July 13, 2004. The citizen wrote that the new law excluded from investigation the rank of Japanese police officials known as ojang, equivalent to noncommissioned officers (hasagwan) during the colonial period. The writer insinuated that Sin might have intentionally omitted the ojang because his father, Sin Sang-muk, had held that rank in the Japanese gendarmerie.

The article caught the attention of the mainstream media and triggered a national controversy. The citizen found records indicating that Sin’s father had passed the entrance exam for the Japanese army and had joined the Japanese military police in the Taegu area. The citizen had a personal motive: his grandfather had been tortured in Taegu jail for participation in the independence movement and had died at the age of 51 from the aftereffects.³

Chairman Sin initially denounced the article as false. Then two registrars of the independence movement came forward and identified Sin’s father by his Japanese name, Shigemitsu Kunio. They testified that Shigemitsu, a kunjo (sergeant) in the Japanese gendarmerie, had tortured them.⁴ Public resentment came to a boil when Kim Chu-sŏk, son of an independence movement participant, wrote in the journal Sindonga that Shigemitsu had tortured Kim’s father for forty days, leaving the lower half of his body paralyzed. Kim’s father, who became an art teacher after liberation, had completed a memoir, with twenty of his own illustrations of the torture scenes, in 1983, a decade before his death.⁵

Chairman Sin responded that he had been dimly aware that his father had entered the Japanese army but had never known exactly what his father had done. Some Koreans were sympathetic to Sin’s ordeal, saying that he was not responsible for his father’s deeds and that he had become a victim of guilt-by-association accusations in the media. But Sin could neither avoid responsibility for initially covering up his father’s past nor put to rest public suspicion that he had intentionally excluded his father’s rank from the committee’s investigation. Sin resigned as party chair.⁶ The conservative media then examined the backgrounds of ruling party politicians and reported whose fathers had been in the Japanese police or in the colonial administration.⁷ The scandals demoralized the ruling party and made the purification of history project an anachronistic farce.⁸

The government committee closed its investigation by publishing a list of pro-Japanese traitors. Among the traitors named in the 2006 report were twenty-seven members of the Ilchinhoe (Advance in Unity Society)—the 1904–1910 organization that is the subject of this book. These men were deemed to have been traitors for the following reasons: (1) they had organized the aides to assist voluntary defense guards (chawidan wŏnhohoe) on November 19, 1907, to counter Korean anti-Japanese guerrillas, the Righteous Armies, who opposed Japanese colonization; (2) they had been Ilchinhoe branch chairs or had held important positions on the Ilchinhoe council (Ilchinhoe p’yŏngŭihoe); (3) they had published statements justifying the Japanese persecution of the Righteous Armies; (4) they had signed the Ilchinhoe’s petition requesting that Japan annex Korea; or (5) they had received awards for their aid to the Japanese army during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). The committee defined these acts as voluntary assistance to Japan’s colonization of Korea and a contribution to the active destruction of Korean resistance for independence.⁹

The scandals of 2004 surprised the Korean public because a fair number of well-known Korean elites, regardless of their current political affiliation, were exposed to charges about their ancestors’ treason. The public also confronted several questions: What kinds of collaborative acts were more unbearable? Could Shigemitsu’s case be equated with those of other Koreans who had worked with the Japanese for a living? And more fundamentally, what did it mean to be collaborative in the colonial period? The committee accomplished virtually nothing in the face of these questions. It confirmed that some famous historical figures had conducted pro-Japanese acts and recorded their names so that they would not be forgotten in history. As the committee’s list was by no means complete, the project wasted the opportunity to investigate more severe crimes or to disclose the complexity of listed cases. The project neither advanced any new historical findings about the scope and character of Korean collaboration under the Japanese nor provided any meaningful intellectual grounds to help the public think about the topic.

Collaboration in Colonial Situations

Given the public condemnation of pro-Japanese collaboration in Korea and China, historians face the question of whether or not they should pursue a moral inquiry in studying collaboration.¹⁰ A recent issue of the Journal of Asian Studies juxtaposes the two different answers to that question.¹¹ John W. Treat suggests that a posterior ethical review of collaboration is possible and necessary. Referring to Western moral theories when contemplating European collaboration under the Nazis, Treat criticizes the moral reasoning of the renowned Korean intellectual Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950) and Yi’s defense of his pro-Japanese acts during the colonial period. Treat’s analysis awakens us to the moral responsibilities that we might have confronted had we been in Yi’s situation and made similar choices following his logic. But Treat’s posterior review runs the risk of anachronism and does not provide a stable historical reference, except for Treat’s own moral theory, for judging collaborators, especially given the fact that the moral problems of the Japanese occupation in East Asia have been sidelined, if not silenced, in the recent historiography of the Japanese empire.

Thus, Timothy Brook argues that Treat’s approach may reproduce historians’ own moral values rather than salvaging those of historical actors. Brook recommends a historicization which is "not to create moral knowledge, but to probe the presuppositions that bring the moral subject of the collaborator into being for us, and then ask whether real collaborators correspond to this moral subject."¹² In my view, Brook’s historicization is insufficient because the moral crises of collaborators did not always originate from the gap between their own values and our presuppositions in hindsight, but often from their failure to justify their own positions within the historical context of colonial rule or occupation. Brook does not make it clear that such presuppositions critical of collaboration are not entirely contingent on political expediency but include some beliefs in right and wrong, and that those beliefs in justice helped certain presuppositions prevail in the public consciousness in a once-occupied society. Historians should legitimately problematize such presuppositions but also adequately interrogate what were indeed the real moral subjects of collaborators and why they became untenable under occupation.

Some conceptual clarifications are required to study collaboration in colonial situations. Underlining the power of colonial culture and discourse, colonial studies in the past two decades have emphasized that colonizers and colonized were far from monolithic groups. Rather, they became culturally hybridized in multiple colonial encounters, so that the colonized did not remain a unified subject of empire—or its passive victim. Frederick Cooper argues that the binary of collaboration and resistance is inadequate to frame the diverse interactions that occurred within and across empires.¹³ Empire, he suggests, is a potential stage for local actors to pursue opportunity, wealth, or even freedom, and he speculates that a linear connection between freedom and nation is inconsistent with what happens in history. Colonial studies in this perspective highlight the tensions of empire yet obscure the historical process of how and why the colonized in many regions did not accept colonial empires as a viable political and moral community and preferred non-imperial tracks, at least in principle, in forming a government after colonialism.

Focused on the domestic and global agendas of empires, this paradigm neglects the dilemmas of local actors who in fact chased opportunities within empire and the profound moral tensions that they confronted in some, if not all, colonial situations. In this book I define collaboration as the political engagements of local actors to support a given colonial rule and to justify its sustenance in their society.¹⁴ Distinct from the broader connections and conflicts pervasive and inevitable in colonial encounters, collaboration by this definition involves political and normative suasions to legitimize local subordination to empire and often entails moral implications. Collaborators made their choices with diverse and in some cases even ethical motives, but they faced a political and moral crisis if they failed to justify the validity of their choices more broadly among the occupied.

The term collaboration has strong negative connotations. The French historian Philippe Burrin argues that the term provokes polemics and prevents us from exploring the diverse adjustments that people make to the structural constraints of being occupied. Limiting the meaning of collaboration to accommodation raised to the level of politics,¹⁵ Burrin divides accommodation into structural and deliberate forms. The structural form refers to the inevitable adjustments that make economy, public services, and everyday life flow even under occupation. The deliberate form includes opportunist and political accommodations that go beyond a minimal adaptation and [amount] to providing material and moral assistance for the occupier’s policies. Burrin argues that accommodation is a regular phenomenon in any foreign occupation and does not associate any moral connotations with the term.¹⁶

But not all occupations cause intense moral controversies about such human adjustments, and without the normative context of an occupation, it is not analytically clear how we should differentiate the structural from the deliberate. Brook, in his study of Chinese collaboration during World War II, suggests that historians should look through the moral landscape to the political one underneath. But as he soon admits, this separation of the moral and the political is methodologically limited when applied to the study of collaboration.¹⁷ Political power requires moral discourse to justify its existence, and collaborators also seek normative justifications of their conduct.¹⁸ The term collaboration and its moral connotations epitomize the specific historical moments where assistance to an occupying power had extraordinary moral ramifications and ultimately failed to legitimize its validity in the normative and material contexts of a society under conquest.¹⁹

Unlike in wartime Europe, collaboration may perhaps be deemed more acceptable in colonial situations, where diverse ethnic or religious communities had not already been subsumed under the rubric of a nation²⁰ and thus found their identities blurred by competing cultural discourses forged under long foreign domination. In such circumstances, the compliance of a community with foreign powers has historically been tolerated, and some local actors indeed accommodated empire as a viable framework in which to obtain power, profits, or safety.²¹ Ronald Robinson calls this kind of compliance the requisite for European expansion. He defines collaboration as arrangements of mutual cooperation and bargaining between Europeans and their local agents in the context of an expanding free-trade regime.²² When empires could establish collaborative regimes with reliable non-European actors, Robinson argues, direct imperial conquests were neither imperative nor desirable. Discounting the metropolitan initiatives for colonial expansion, Robinson primarily attributes an empire’s shift to direct rule to a peripheral crisis—namely, local disorder and the surge of nationalism, which threaten an empire’s security interests on an international scale. Robinson discusses collaboration mainly from the viewpoint of an empire’s rational calculations of costs and benefits, and does not provide an adequate framework for examining the normative ramifications of European imperialism and the crises of local collaborative regimes once they had been established.

Studying collaboration is a matter not of imposing an anachronistic moral framework onto the experiences of the past, but of understanding the choices and consequences of local actors in the changing political, normative, and material contexts of a conquered society. It is also important not to dismiss a certain moral consciousness of a conquered society as simply an artifact of the post-colonial nation-state, but to question why and how such consciousness emerged in a society and reshaped the society into a political community with distinctive characteristics.²³

Collaboration does not deny the heterogeneity or multiplicity of human interactions in colonial contexts. The term by definition refers to the choices of local people who crossed the colonial binary and worked with or for colonizers.²⁴ The concept of collaboration in this book, however, does connote the potential for moral strife vis-à-vis local submission to colonial rule. Moral strife was particularly likely when cultural, economic, or political ambivalence in a given colony could not override a forced hierarchy, nor erase the privileges of colonizers on the basis of their racial superiority. It remains important to investigate how ethnic heterogeneity or cultural hybridization in colonial situations was translated in political institutions and moral discourse, and whether or not such translations rendered marginal the distinction between colonizers and colonized.

Korean Reformers and the Japanese Empire

This history of Korean collaboration significantly revises the historiography of the past several decades on the Japanese colonization of Korea—historiography in which the relationship between Korean reform and Japanese empire has been central and most controversial. The term pro-Japanese (ch’inil in Korean) means those who are close to Japan, but in modern Korean usage it immediately connotes national traitors who sold the country to Japan. At least before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, being pro-Japanese was not simply equated with being unpatriotic, and Japan Party was another term for the Korean reformers who rivaled the ruling pro-Russian faction in the Korean court. During the Japanese protectorate period of 1905–1910, being close to Japan, a viable choice for Korea’s reform, became equivalent to treason. Korean reformers here refers to the elites in the tradition of the enlightenment school, who had introduced Western and Japanese ideas, technologies, and institutions into Korean culture since the mid-nineteenth century and who tried to reform the Chosŏn dynasty. These elites initiated the successive political movements for reform that led to the 1884 palace coup, the formation of the Kabo reformist cabinet in 1894, and the Independence Club Movement between 1896 and 1898. They perceived Japan’s progress after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to have been beneficial and sought Japan’s assistance in their major political endeavors.

The discourse of civilization and enlightenment (munmyŏng kaehwa) was a major ideological frame within which both the Korean reformers and the Japanese discussed politics, reform, and culture in Korea between 1896 and 1910. Andre Schmid argues in his book Korea between Empires that this language of civilization and enlightenment created structural dilemmas within Korean nationalist discourses and reform ideas because it offered tools for promoting the nation’s progress but simultaneously legitimized Korea’s subordination to Japan, a country with an advanced civilization.²⁵ In my view, the discourse of civilization and enlightenment was not structurally bound to such dilemmas but rather open to generating multiple political visions. Such dilemmas or confusions rather signify a global conjuncture at which different historical actors simultaneously proposed diverse interpretations of enlightenment justifying their own political imperatives vis-à-vis Korea.²⁶ The unfortunate consequence of this conjuncture—Japan’s colonization of Korea—was not necessarily derived from the language of enlightenment and its inherent complicity with imperialism, but resulted from the choices of historical actors and their relations power enforcing their own versions of a reformed Korea. Thus it is important to clarify the multiple positions of historical actors in the political dynamics of the period and to figure out what they meant by reform, despite the confusion and interpenetration observed in their discourses. The first step in this task is to analyze how Korea’s reform and Japan’s colonization of Korea have been narrated in the previous historiography.

American historians of Japan have long underlined the link between Japan’s civilizing discourses and the Korean reform itself, portraying Japan as a reformist empire reluctant to annex Korea.²⁷ Three important works in English are Hilary Conroy’s The Japanese Seizure of Korea (1960), Peter Duus’s The Abacus and the Sword (1995), and Alexis Dudden’s Japan’s Colonization of Korea (2005). Conroy argues that Meiji leaders formulated their Korea policies in a framework of realistic enlightened self-interest and attempted to construct a mutually acceptable Japan-Korea relationship.²⁸ Conroy maintains that until April 1909, Itō Hirobumi, the first resident-general of Korea, and his successor, Sone Arasuke, opposed the Yamagata-Katsura faction, which saw annexation as the ultimate solution to the Korean problem. Itō finally decided on annexation when his enlightened realism became caught up in the reactionary movement of Uchida Ryōhei, the key figure of the Japanese rightist organization Kokuryūkai (Black Dragon Society).²⁹ Conroy writes that the Ilchinhoe was Uchida’s instrument, aiding Uchida’s maneuvering to dethrone the Korean monarch Kojong and to expedite the annexation.

Peter Duus provides a more comprehensive narrative of the colonization and suggests an earlier date, mid-1907, for Itō’s final decision on annexation. He highlights two interacting agents of Japanese expansion in Korea: the Meiji metropolitan leadership and the Japanese settler community in Korea.³⁰ Influenced by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, who attribute empire’s shift to formal rule to a peripheral crisis, Duus connects the Meiji leaders’ decision to annex Korea to the prospect of Korean reform. According to Duus, the original intention of the Meiji leaders was to replace a corrupt Korean government with a rationally organized modern bureaucratic structure analogous to that of the Meiji government.³¹ This Japanese attempt failed twice: first in 1894–1895 and again during Itō Hirobumi’s protectorate rule in 1905–1910.³² The first attempt failed as a result of the Triple Intervention and the incompetence of the Korean reformers. In the second attempt, after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japan did not face any urgent external threat that made its formal rule of Korea imperative. Duus finds the reason for annexation in the Korean domestic situation—namely, in the absence of reliable Korean political allies that made Itō shift toward de facto annexation in late July 1907.³³

Alexis Dudden’s work conceives the reformist politics of the protectorate as Japan’s discursive strategy to make its conquest of Korea legal and intelligible to the international audience of the time. In this framework, Japan’s civilizing mission in Korea was not what Japan genuinely intended but failed to accomplish because of Japanese rivalries or Korean incompetence. Rather, Japan’s mission was consistent with what Dudden calls the enlightened exploitation that international powers used to legalize their conquest of a place by defining its native inhabitants as incapable of becoming civilized on their own. Far from failing, she insists, Japan successfully demonstrated its mastery of this international language by branding Koreans as barbaric.³⁴ Japan’s legal reforms in Korea garnered international recognition of the legality of Japan’s rule in Korea, abrogating extraterritoriality privileges there in 1913.³⁵

Dudden is attentive to Korean dissent and to the pitfalls of Japan’s penal administration in colonial Korea, including its preservation of torture and flogging. But her asymmetrical focus on the Japanese discourse prevents her from fundamentally criticizing Conroy’s and Duus’s depiction of Japan as a reluctant and reformist empire and also from articulating what that reform meant to Koreans. It is still debatable whether the Meiji leadership, which had already colonized Taiwan in 1895, considered the option of a modernizing Korea as an ally, especially after waging a costly war with Russia. It is also questionable whether the decision to make Korea a formal colony was propelled primarily by the Korean domestic situation. In all three works, the history of Korean reformers during the Japanese protectorate remains an obscure side note.

If the historiography of the Japanese empire has assumed the insufficiency, if not the absence, of Korean reform(ers) and their incompatibility with the modernity of Meiji imperialism, Korean nationalist historians have seen a problem in the very reliance of Korean reformers on the Japanese. A few scholars have tried to address the agency of Korean elites in the 1894 cabinet and their conflicts with more conservative Japanese approaches to Korea’s reform.³⁶ However, nationalistic Korean historians devalue the accomplishments of reformers close to Japan and redeem the projects of the monarch Kojong as an uncontaminated source of indigenous modernization. The renowned historian of the Chosŏn dynasty Yi T’ae-jin calls Kojong an enlightened monarch who revitalized the Korean tradition of ideal monarchs represented by King Chŏngjo in the late eighteenth century.³⁷ Yi even identifies some domestic challenges to the monarch as a product of Japanese machinations designed to undermine Kojong’s reform.³⁸ This monarch-centering turn has recently become a mainstream narrative among the Korean public and in media portrayals of the Chosŏn dynasty’s final decades.³⁹

This restoration paradigm is limited, however, because it does not analyze each of the political actors, either reformers or monarch, in the dynamics of their mutual interactions and in the overall historical context of the period. It also does not take into account that being close to Japan changed in meaning from the late nineteenth century to the early colonial period. As a result, this paradigm overestimates the progress of Kojong’s reform and overlooks both how Kojong lost his chance to construct a larger basis of support for his reform.⁴⁰ Overall, it does not explain how and why the Korean monarchy, known for its stability and longevity, lost its symbolic importance among Koreans and yielded, within a decade of the annexation, to the vision of a republic as announced in the March 1, 1919, Declaration of Korean Independence.

Between 1896 and 1904, pro-Japanese elements did grow among Korean anti-status-quo groups, creating a sizable political base that anticipated Japan’s positive role in reforming Korea. What made this pro-Japanese base substantial was the conversion of the Tonghaks, who later became the mainstay of the Ilchinhoe itself. This growth of pro-Japanese reformers challenges Duus’s thesis that weak domestic collaboration or the incompetence of Korean reformers resulted in formal annexation. The question could be rephrased: Why did Itō Hirobumi fail to transform Korea into a modern and independent ally if a significant number of pro-Japanese reformers were awaiting Japan’s good intentions in Korea?

An answer to this question lies in clarifying how Korean reformers perceived their agendas and how their movements intersected with the goals and motions of Japanese imperialism in Korea. This book finds that the directions of Korean reformers, whether elitist or populist, contradicted Japan’s principal objectives in Korea. Although both Korean elites and the Japanese constantly reiterated reform, Korean reformers wished to institutionalize constraints, whether elitist or populist, over the monarchy, and considered such constraints essential to strengthening state and country. Itō Hirobumi, the first resident-general, was much more concerned with the stability of Japanese domination than with the agendas of the Korean reformers. When Itō found the different opinions of Koreans a hindrance to his administration, he divided Koreans into pro- and anti-Japanese categories and ordered them to strictly follow his orders. Itō’s policy was most damaging to pro-Japanese reformers because it constrained their ability to coordinate their own agendas with Japan’s goals and to counter the charge of being simply traitors.

The Ilchinhoe: A Populist Collaborator

Between 1896 and 1910, crucial changes occurred, establishing a Korean path to modernity, characterized by the king’s disappearance from the national imagination, the articulation of Korean ethnic nationalism, and a republican vision for the nation’s future. Andre Schmid, in Korea between Empires, analyzes the intellectual history of this period not within a linear history of national progress but in association with the discursive process of empire or, more broadly, with that of capitalist modernity.⁴¹ As mentioned earlier, he emphasizes the power of colonial knowledge in shaping Korean nationalist ideologies but pays less attention to the specific reform ideas and their action plans, which many political essayists of this period were struggling with.

Korean reformers during this time debated how to redefine the king’s sovereignty and the rights of the people. Unlike in Japan, Korean reformist discourses were not constructed upon the monarchy’s symbolic sanctity. This difference deserves a historical inquiry because the Chosŏn dynasty is known for its stability via Confucian indoctrination of its subjects and the arrangements for checks and balances in the dynasty’s elaborate institutions. Christine Kim pursues this question by analyzing the pageantry of the last Korean emperor, Sunjong, as choreographed by the protectorate governor Itō Hirobumi.⁴² Kim argues that Itō organized this procession to appropriate the symbolic capital of the Korean monarchy and to advertise the modern progress of Korea under Japan’s guidance. Contrary to Itō’s intention, this procession projected Sunjong as the icon of Korea’s frail destiny under Japan’s reign and exacerbated Korean nationalism and Japanese criticism of Itō’s rule in Korea. Then why did such Korean reverence for the Korean monarchy vanish in the subsequent political discourse of Koreans? Koreans grieved at the funerals of Kojong and Sunjong during the colonial period but scarcely tied the nation’s independence to the restoration of the Korean imperial house. The Ilchinhoe’s history constitutes an essential episode in explaining this transition between 1896 and 1910, when Korean reformers relinquished the monarchy’s sanctity and envisioned a people’s country for the Korean nation.

Ilchinhoe members, the main subject of this book, had their roots in the Korean religion known as Tonghak (Eastern Learning).⁴³ Founded in the 1860s, the religion challenged the Chosŏn dynasty’s Confucian establishment and inspired the nationwide 1894 peasant rebellion. The Tonghaks could be dubbed subalterns who, after the rebellion, took the idiosyncratic path of supporting empire. Subaltern studies began with inquiring into the sociality and political community of the subaltern and arrived at recognizing the heterogeneity of subaltern discourse and the limitations of historical knowledge in retrieving the voices of the subaltern, when their subject positions were not given in the discursive structures available to modern historians.⁴⁴ This recognition of the subaltern silence converses with the position of postcolonial studies that call such silence a moment for criticizing the limits of modern knowledge and that seek to reorient the history of colonialism into a critique of colonial discourse, both its power and failures, in subordinating such subaltern positions.⁴⁵

While acknowledging the power of postcolonial critiques, this book nevertheless takes a historical and empirical perspective that privileges agents over structure, assuming that language is a constraint but also a resource.⁴⁶ Rather than being mere subjects constructed by discourses of colonial power, Koreans adopted diverse ideas and idioms, indigenous and foreign, to propose their own claims on power and life. Besides, because the Ilchinhoe members were largely illiterate, they exhibited an inconsistency between their public statements and actions, and the contours of their actions did not correspond to their official statements. Speech is an action,⁴⁷ but in the Ilchinhoe’s case, words often obliterated deeds. Sharing the vocabulary of civilization and enlightenment, the Ilchinhoe’s statements were ambiguous as to how the group’s position differed both from the Japanese discourse and from the perspectives of Korean elites. However, when viewed in conjunction with their actions, the unique position of the Ilchinhoe members emerged on the reform of the Korean monarchy and on Japanese protectorate rule.

In this book, I define the Ilchinhoe’s position as populist. Populism is a concept used to describe various historical cases, from nineteenth-century U.S. agrarian movements to Latin America’s state corporatism and multiclass parties of the twentieth century.⁴⁸ Populism of the late nineteenth century in the United States and Russia grew from the mature democratic cultures or