Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power James C. Baxter Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power. By Alexis Dudden. University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. 213 pages. Hardcover $45.00. Alexis Dudden takes up a matter of enduring significance and—it seems—everlasting controversy in Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power. How did Japanese government spokesmen and their sympathizers explain Japan's actions in establishing a protectorate in Korea in 1905 and in annexing the peninsula in 1910, and why did the dominant nations of the day acquiesce so readily in this phased extirpation of the Korean state? How was it that the outside world, or anyway all the powerful states that defined legality in international relations, accepted the legitimacy of Japan's claims? Focusing on "the discursive aspects of Japan's annexation of Korea" (p. 2), Dudden sets an agenda that contrasts with earlier Western scholarship on the subject. The books that have generally been thought of as the standard treatments in English, Hilary Conroy's The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1868-1910: A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960) and Peter Duus's The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910 (University of California Press, 1997) are hefty, broad-ranging studies that concentrate basically on political and diplomatic history. Dudden does not engage in detailed analysis of the politics of imperialism and nationalism such as occupied her eminent forerunners. She examines instead the rhetoric of Japanese and Koreans who played parts in the events leading up to annexation, and she puts their use of terms such as "sovereignty" (kunshuken), "independence" (jishu), "protectorate" (hogokoku), and "annexation" (heigō) into the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international discourse about national sovereignty and legitimacy. Displaying a nice dramatic sense, Dudden begins her first chapter, "Illegal Korea," with an account of the appeal made by representatives of Korea's Emperor Kojong at the 1907 International Conference on Peace at the Hague. The envoys attempted to get a hearing for their assertion that the protectorate agreement of 1905, which provided for Japanese takeover of Korean foreign affairs, among other things, was invalid. The forty-three nations participating in the conference, however, were unwilling to risk undermining the international order by listening to them. The international community had accepted the concept of a protectorate two decades earlier. Dudden links the thinking about protectorates to "race-driven theories of civilization" that "shaped a Euro-American political climate" (p. 9). The discourse and politics of "enlightened exploitation," as she labels it, legalized Japan's actions. From the early days of their regime, "[f]or the architects of Meiji Japan, building the new nation-state necessarily meant creating one that would engage openly with [End Page 409] the world in international terms" (p. 31). In chapter 2, Dudden reviews some of the history of Japanese encounters with those terms. Before the Restoration, Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law was being studied by Japanese scholars in William Martin's Chinese translation and also in a bakufu-sponsored synoptic version in Japanese. Nishi Amane's Bankoku kōhō, a transcription of his notes on lectures by Simon Vissering in Leiden between 1862 and 1866, was published in 1868. Anti-bakufu intellectuals, too, took part in the effort to interpret and domesticate the new Western terminology; Dudden gives us the example of Shigeno Yasutsugu, who put his own Japanese and Martin's Chinese on facing pages of an edition of Wheaton's text for the lord of Satsuma. Tutoring Meiji officials on "The Vocabulary of Power" (as Dudden titles her third chapter), Gustave Boissonade provided critical counsel in 1875-1876 when Japan was negotiating a new Treaty of Peace and Friendship with reluctant Koreans. The French legal scholar continued to give highly useful advice throughout his long (1873-1895) employment by the Japanese state, and his way of thinking about the relationships among nations was internalized by opinion leaders both in and out of government. No one absorbed the logic and language of the European-dominated system better than Itō Hirobumi, who one-upped Li Hongzhang by negotiating the...