Korea (Japanese)

Korea under Japanese rule ran from formal annexation in 1910 to Japan's surrender in 1945. The takeover was staged over years. Japan had beaten China in 1895 and Russia in 1905 largely over Korea, made it a protectorate that year, forced the emperor's abdication in 1907, and disbanded the Korean army. The last treaty was signed by a prime minister acting without his monarch's seal. Rule was direct and militarised: governors-general were serving generals, and a gendarmerie policed the countryside. Land was surveyed and registered in ways that transferred much of it to Japanese companies and settlers. Rice was exported to Japan while Korean consumption fell. The March First Movement of 1919 brought perhaps two million people into peaceful demonstrations and was put down with thousands killed. Japan then softened the surface, permitting Korean newspapers, and tightened again in the 1930s. From 1938 assimilation was compulsory: Korean was removed from schools, worship at Shinto shrines required, and families pressed to adopt Japanese names. During the war hundreds of thousands were conscripted for labour in Japanese mines and factories, and tens of thousands of women across the empire were forced into military brothels, a matter still unresolved between the two governments. Liberation came with the surrender in August 1945. It arrived with a partition: Soviet forces took the north and American forces the south, along a line drawn in Washington in half an hour. Korea has been two states ever since. The Korean royal family was absorbed into the Japanese peerage. Hangul was taught, then restricted, then banned from schools entirely. Independence activists ran a provisional government in exile from Shanghai and later Chongqing throughout. The division of 1945 was drawn by two American officers with a National Geographic map.

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