Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852’1912 (116 page)

After searching the various rooms, the
s
ō
shi
found the queen in one of the side rooms where she was attempting to hide, and catching hold of her cut her down with their swords.

It is not certain whether, though so grievously wounded, she was then actually dead; but she was laid upon a plank, wrapped up with a silk comfort (used as bed-clothing) and taken out into the court-yard. Very soon afterward, under the direction of the Japanese
s
ō
shi
, the body was taken from the court-yard to a grove of trees not far distant, in the deer park, and there kerosene oil was poured over the body and faggots of wood piled around and all set on fire….

It was thus that our beloved and venerated queen of Korea and mother of His Royal Highness, the crown prince, was cruelly assassinated and her body burned to destroy evidence of the crime.
²⁹

This official Korean report did not exaggerate the circumstances of the murder. Witnesses at the trials in Japan and Korea reported that brute force had been used by the Japanese against the king and the crown prince. The intruders who broke into the king’s apartment demanded that the king and crown prince reveal where the queen was hiding. When they failed to answer, they were manhandled and threatened with swords and pistols. Court ladies were also threatened by
s
ō
shi
who demanded they reveal the queen’s whereabouts, but not understanding Japanese, they could only scream in fright.
³⁰

Brushing off the king’s attempt to bar the way, the Japanese intruders stormed into the next room, where they killed the minister of the royal household, Yi Kyong-jik, who was attempting to defend the queen’s apartment. In the queen’s apartment, they killed three court ladies, all of them beautiful, but they could not be sure which one was the queen, since none of the men had ever seen her. Other court ladies and the crown prince were dragged into the room to make the identification.
³¹

It is not clear who actually killed Queen Min. Okamoto Ry
ū
nosuke was accused of the murder, but other men proudly took credit. A medicine peddler named Terasaki Yasukichi recalled how he and two other Japanese had broken into the queen’s apartment:

We went on inside. When we got into XX’s room there were some 20 or 30 court ladies there. We flung them off one at a time. Then, when we looked under the bedding, there was someone dressed exactly the same as the other court ladies, but quite self-possessed, not making a fuss, looking like somebody important, and this told us it was XX. Grabbing her by the hair, we dragged her from her hiding place. Just what you’d expect, she wasn’t in the least bit ruffled…. I swung my sword down on her head. Nakamura was holding her by the hair, so his hand got slightly cut. I let her have it from the head, so one blow was enough to finish her. The others criticized me saying I was too reckless, killing her before we had identified that it was XX, but later on it turned out it really was XX.

Terasaki boasted of his achievement, as did other Japanese, including some who had not so much as entered the room where the queen was murdered.
³²

Once Queen Min was dead, other
s
ō
shi
stole her possessions. The Japanese consul Uchida Sadatsuchi reported: “Sassa Masayuki stole a perfume sachet and other valuable articles that were on the queen’s body, and other intruders stole various things from the queen’s room.”
³³

It was reported that after the queen had been wounded in two or three places, “they stripped her naked and examined her private parts.” Her body was carried out to the garden and burned there. She was in her forty-fifth year, but she looked no more than twenty-five or twenty-six.

Queen Min was an arrogant and corrupt woman.
³⁴
She was certainly not “beloved and venerated” by Korean people who were acquainted with her activities, even if they admired her resolutely anti-Japanese stand. But the manner in which she was killed was unspeakably barbaric, and contrary to Japanese hopes, her death did not solve their problems in Korea. In the words of a Korean diplomat,

Despite the attempt of the Japanese officials to minimize their responsibility for the incident, it did more harm to Japan in the eyes of the Western world than anything else at that time. Japan, at one blow, lost all the influence in Korea which her success in the war with China had won for her. Indeed, it was not regained until she had fought another and a greater war against Russia.
³⁵

News of the murder was slow in reaching the rest of the world and might have been kept secret indefinitely had not two foreigners—General William M. Dye, the American who had trained the Self-Defense Unit, and the Russian electrical engineer Alexander Sabatin—witnessed the events.
³⁶
They told others what had happened, and rumors spread throughout the foreign community in Seoul.

The American and Russian ministers called on Miura to ask for an explanation. He was calmness itself and noted with wry pleasure that their knees were shaking. He told them, “You haven’t got any of your people living here, but I have a whole Japanese community to look after. With respect to what happened, I bear a heavy responsibility toward my home government, but there is no reason why I should be questioned by you about my responsibility. It may well be, as you say, that Japanese were involved in this incident, but we won’t know until an investigation has been completed whether they were all Japanese. Koreans sometimes deliberately pose as Japanese, aware that otherwise they will be looked down on. That’s why they sometimes use Japanese swords. And that’s why we must investigate, to discover how many were real Japanese and how many were fakes. To say that because they acted like Japanese and carried Japanese swords proves they were Japanese is jumping to conclusions. But that is my responsibility. And there is no reason why I must be subjected to questions by you.”
³⁷
He refused to submit to any further questioning.

Quite by accident, Colonel John Albert Cockerill, the celebrated correspondent of the
New York Herald
, happened to be in Seoul. Learning from Dye of the assassination, he attempted to cable a dispatch to his newspaper, but Miura applied pressure on the telegraph office to prevent the message from getting out. On October 14 word finally reached Washington. The Japanese legation, when asked to confirm the report, stated that it

merely received advices to the effect that a portion of the Corean army, excited by the report that the queen proposed to disarm and disband them, marched upon the castle, headed by Tai Won Kun. The dispatch failed to say whether or not the queen had been killed, but the attachés infer from its content that she has met such a fate.
³⁸

Miura intended that the world believe that what had happened was a purely Korean affair—the
taewon’gun
had staged a coup d’état with the help of Korean troops who were unhappy about the queen’s decision to disband them.
³⁹
This fabrication would probably have been believed if not for the two foreign witnesses who knew that Miura was lying. His first report to T
ō
ky
ō
(which arrived on October 9) was so vaguely phrased that the Japanese government suspected that something was being concealed. The emperor was much disturbed by the extreme lack of clarity in the message sent to him from the Foreign Ministry.
⁴⁰
He is said to have remarked with a frown to the military attaché Kawashima Reijir
ō
, who informed him of what had happened, “Once Gor
ō
makes up his mind about something, he doesn’t hesitate to carry it out.”
⁴¹
The emperor evidently surmised that Miura had been behind whatever had occurred.

On the evening of October 9 the emperor sent Kawashima to the General Staff Office to inquire about the incident in Seoul and to ask the army to investigate. Kawashima was received by the second in command, who promised to send someone at once to Seoul to investigate. On the thirteenth an order was issued prohibiting unauthorized Japanese from traveling to Korea, as it was feared that “lawless elements” might create fresh diplomatic problems.
⁴²
On October 17 Miura Gor
ō
was recalled to Japan. He would be replaced as minister by Komura Jutar
ō
, a career diplomat.

On October 19 an ambassador arrived in T
ō
ky
ō
from Korea with gifts for the emperor and empress from the king. There was also a letter in which the king expressed his joy over the signing of the peace treaty between China and Japan and declared that the independence of Korea and the governmental reforms were thanks entirely to the depth of the emperor’s neighborly feelings. The ambassador, in turn, was given presents from the emperor and empress to take back to the king.
⁴³
The ritual exchange of presents at a most inappropriate time masked whatever real feelings were involved.

On October 21 It
ō
Hirobumi decided to send Inoue Kaoru to Korea as special ambassador. He said that the recent incident involving Queen Min not only was a violation of the policies that hitherto had been followed by the Japanese government but had given rise to extraordinary international reactions. For this reason, he was giving Inoue precise instructions concerning his powers and duties lest misunderstandings arise in the future. Inoue’s mission was to convey to the king the imperial household’s sympathy over the death of Queen Min and its regret that Japanese subjects had participated in the incident.
⁴⁴

As for future Japanese policy toward Korea, It
ō
believed that it served no useful purpose to aid internal reforms in Korea, much less attempt to force them on the Koreans. A policy of disengagement—leaving Korean affairs to the Koreans—would gradually be put into effect. He believed that Japanese policy toward Korea should be passive. If the necessity ever arose to take more positive measures, the resident minister should await instructions from the Japanese government before acting.

On October 24 when the Korean minister to Japan was about to return to his country, having completed his tour of duty, the emperor received him in audience and expressed regret over the death of Queen Min.
⁴⁵
On the same day Miura Gor
ō
was officially relieved of his post because of his failure to obey government orders. On November 5 his privileges as a member of the nobility were suspended.

The assassination of Queen Min had brought disaster to almost everyone concerned. The king of Korea not only had lost his beautiful wife but had been forced to sign a royal edict in which he blamed Queen Min for having “made dull our senses, exposed the people to extortion, put Our Government in disorder, selling offices and titles.” He had accordingly deposed her from the rank of queen and reduced her to the level of the lowest class.
⁴⁶
Miura, the chief architect of the assassination, was in disgrace. It
ō
Hirobumi’s overarching plan for Japan to gain recognition as equal among the eminent countries of the world had been frustrated by an unseemly action. Inoue Kaoru’s hopes for reforming the Korean government would be annulled by the new policy of keeping hands off Korea’s internal policies. Furthermore, with the death of Queen Min, the Russians had lost influence at court.
⁴⁷

The only person likely to have felt satisfaction over these developments was the
taewon’gun
. No sooner had “his” coup succeeded than he demanded that Kojong replace members of the cabinet with pro-Japanese men of his choice.
⁴⁸
The Self-Defense Unit, the king’s personal guard, was amalgamated into the Training Unit, which kept the king a virtual prisoner. The king helplessly agreed to everything demanded of him, but he became convinced that people were trying to poison him and refused to eat food unless it had been prepared in the kitchen of one of the foreign legations.
⁴⁹

Pressure was mounting, however, to punish the Japanese who had been involved in the murder, and Miura could no longer pretend that no Japanese had participated. He decided to conduct an investigation that would result in severe punishment for “several people” and the banishment from Korea of some twenty more. Because Japan enjoyed extraterritoriality in Korea, the investigation would be conducted not by Koreans but by the Japanese police headed by a commissioner who himself was deeply involved in the incident.
⁵⁰

Shiba Shir
ō
, another of Miura’s advisers,
⁵¹
obtained 6,000 yen, supposedly from the
taewon’gun
, for distribution among his “benefactors.” This money probably came not from the
taewon’gun
but from Miura as a means of shoring up his claim that the
taewon’gun
had instigated the incident.
⁵²
It would also buy the silence of those banished from Korea. The Japanese government refused, however, to go along with this plan, giving instructions that no disposition of those involved in the incident be made until the new minister, Komura Jutar
ō
, arrived. Everyone suspected of involvement would be sent to Japan for trial, a demonstration by the government of its resolve to abide by international law.