Page:Japan by the Japanese (1904).djvu/185

The new Imperial Government was hardly organized, when it found itself face to face with important international questions, which demanded early solutions. These were the question of peace or war with Corea; of confirming or abandoning the territorial right of Japan to the islands of Sakhalin and Liukiu, in view of the rival claims of Russia and China respectively; and the question of treaty revision. Let us first state these questions themselves, and then pass on to the narration of how we proceeded to solve them, and in what order.

Japan had from time immemorial a trading settlement in Corea in the port of Fusan. It can be traced in history certainly as far back as the year 1443, under the Ashikaga Shogunate. And as this port lay opposite the island of Tsushima, so, under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the protection of trade between Japan and Corea was entrusted to So, Daimyo of Tsushima. In 1868 the new Imperial Government ordered So to send a special mission to Corea, in order to inform that Government of the political change that had lately taken place in Japan, and announce the intention of continuing peaceful intercourse with her as before. But the father of the King of Corea, usually known by the title of Tai-in-kun, who had never sat on the throne himself, but was at this time acting as Regent, refused to have anything to do with the mission. His pretext was that the wording and the seal in the document produced by the mission were not the same as before. But the real fact was that he had already heard of Japan’s adopting Western things and ideas, and from his point of view the throwing away of the time-honoured national customs and institutions in exchange for Western ‘barbarism’ was in itself a sufficient proof of the disdainful character of the Japanese as a nation. As to his implacable hatred of Western nations, there were some historical examples. In 1847 the French under Louis Philippe sent two men-of-war against Corea, in order to chastise her for the murder of some Catholic missionaries several years back; but both vessels were stranded on the Corean coast, and Tai-in-kun then caused the whole Christian population to be massacred. In 1866 Napoleon III. sent three men-of-war against Corea; the vessels went up the Han River, bombarded the forts, and landed 400 men, but were repulsed, and came away effecting nothing beyond deepening the Corean hatred of foreigners. Now, these 400 soldiers had been taken out of the French garrison in Yoko-