Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910

The treaty of 22 August 1910 ended the Korean Empire as a state and made Korea part of the Empire of Japan. Signed by the Korean prime minister Ye Wanyong and the Japanese resident-general Terauchi Masatake, and made public on 29 August, it was the final step in a series of agreements that had stripped Korea of its independence piece by piece. Japanese rule lasted until 1945, and in Korea the date is still remembered as a day of national humiliation.

Japan had forced Korea, then ruled by the Joseon dynasty, to open its ports with an unequal treaty in 1876, and spent the following decades pushing out rival influences. Victory over China in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 ended Chinese suzerainty, and Korea proclaimed itself an empire. Japan's defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 left it the dominant power in the region. During that war Japanese troops occupied Seoul, and Korea was obliged to accept Japanese military use of its territory and Japanese advisers in its government.

On 17 November 1905, after days of pressure on Gojong and his ministers, Japan obtained a treaty that took away Korea's control of its foreign affairs and made it a Japanese protectorate. Itō Hirobumi became the first resident-general. When Emperor Gojong secretly sent envoys to the peace conference at The Hague in 1907 to protest, Japan forced him to abdicate in favour of his son Sunjong on 18 July. Six days later a new treaty gave the resident-general power to appoint and dismiss senior officials, and a secret annex placed the Korean army, courts and police under Japanese direction. The army was disbanded, and many former soldiers joined the "righteous armies", peasant militias that fought the Japanese in their tens of thousands.

The Japanese cabinet had settled on annexation by July 1909, while looking for a way to carry it out with the least disruption and with an appearance of international legitimacy. Itō, who had at first favoured a protectorate, came round to annexation; on 26 October 1909 he was shot dead at Harbin station in Manchuria by the Korean nationalist An Jung-geun. Japanese officials encouraged the pro-Japanese Iljinhoe society to petition for a "merger". In May 1910 the war minister, Terauchi, was given the task of completing the takeover.

Of the treaty's eight articles, the first declared that the Korean emperor ceded to the Japanese emperor, completely and permanently, all sovereign rights over the whole of Korea. The document bore the Korean state seal, but Sunjong did not sign it himself, as Korean law required; it was signed by Ye Wanyong and Terauchi. Terauchi became the first governor-general of Korea, now officially named Chōsen.

Koreans came to call the agreement a "forced treaty". The exiled Korean Provisional Government and later South Korea held that it had been void from the start, while Japan rejected that view. When the two countries finally established relations in 1965, they settled on a compromise wording: all treaties concluded between the two empires on or before 22 August 1910 were declared "already null and void", leaving open from when. The question remains alive. Academic conferences at Harvard in 2001 re-examined its legality, and in 2010, the centenary, groups of Korean and Japanese intellectuals issued joint declarations that the treaty had never been valid.

Our 1900 map shows the independent Korean state, and the 1914 to 1938 maps show Korea within the Japanese empire. The peninsula's later split into North Korea and South Korea is covered under the division of Korea.