Writing Down the Names — The Five Eulsa Traitors, 17 November 1905

17 November 1905, Jungmyeongjeon Hall

Japan had already cleared the board that summer. The Taft–Katsura agreement of July bought American acquiescence; the second Anglo-Japanese Alliance of August bought British consent; the Treaty of Portsmouth in September removed Russia. By autumn, no power was left to stand with the Korean Empire.

Ito Hirobumi arrived in Seoul on 9 November as special envoy. He presented the draft treaty to Emperor Gojong on 15 November; the emperor gave no answer. Two days later, on 17 November, Japanese minister Hayashi Gonsuke assembled the Korean cabinet. Outside the hall stood troops of the Japanese garrison under commander Hasegawa Yoshimichi.

Gojong did not attend. Ito went to each minister in turn and demanded a yes or no. Han Gyu-seol, the chief state councillor, refused to the end and was dragged into a side room. Ito counted the remaining answers, declared that "a majority has assented," and the seal was affixed in the name of Foreign Minister Pak Je-sun. The document is dated 17 November, though the signing is generally held to have concluded in the early hours of the 18th.

Why "coerced pact," not "treaty"

The document lacks what a treaty must have.

• No imperial ratification. Gojong never gave his sanction, and the national seal was never applied.
• No title. The document begins with its body. Every name it goes by was attached afterwards.
• Coercion. Troops encircled the palace, and the minister who objected was removed from the room.

In 1963 the UN International Law Commission, listing treaties procured by coercion of a state's representatives, included this 1905 document. In 2010, on the centenary of annexation, Korean and Japanese intellectuals issued a joint statement affirming that it was null from the outset. Hence the Korean usage neukyak (勒約) — a pact extracted by force — rather than joyak, treaty.

The names and the offices — the Five Eulsa Traitors

These are the five who assented. What matters is not their faces but their names, their offices, and what they were paid.

After the 1910 annexation all five received Japanese peerages and grants of money, and seats as advisers or vice-president of the Central Council of the Government-General. All five appear in the 2009 Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators, and all five are on the state-certified list of 1,006 pro-Japanese collaborators determined by the Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism.

Names in the room that are not among the five

Chief State Councillor Han Gyu-seol objected to the last and was hauled out. Finance Minister Min Yeong-gi also objected. Justice Minister Yi Ha-yeong voiced opposition — and later accepted a viscountcy and is himself listed in the dictionary. Yi Jae-geuk, minister of the royal household, was present but was not among those polled.

The record does not divide neatly. That is precisely why it must be written precisely.

That winter: the names answered with their lives

To record only the five is to record half.

On 20 November 1905 the Hwangseong Sinmun carried Jang Ji-yeon's editorial "Today We Cry Aloud" (是日也放聲大哭). The paper was suspended and Jang was jailed. Jang, too, was later entered in the dictionary for his subsequent conduct. That a life does not reduce to a single scene is also something the record teaches.

On 30 November Min Yeong-hwan took his own life, leaving a final address to the twenty million people of Korea. Former State Councillor Jo Byeong-se followed the same day; then Hong Man-sik, Yi Sang-cheol, Kim Bong-hak, and on 30 December the scholar Song Byeong-seon. Earlier that May, Yi Han-eung, acting minister to Britain, had ended his life in London.

Two kinds of names must be recorded: those who sold, and those who died rather than be sold.

The work of writing names down

On 8 November 2009 the Institute for Research on National Issues and its compilation committee published a three-volume dictionary listing 4,389 people. It was built by combing roughly 3,000 kinds of colonial-era sources — official documents, newspapers, magazines — into a database of 2.5 million biographical records. Its period of coverage begins around the Eulsa pact itself. November 1905 is, in effect, the dictionary's first page.

How the book came to exist is its own record. In December 2003 the National Assembly struck the entire 500 million won research budget. Citizens began an online fundraising drive early the next year and reached that same 500 million won in ten days; donations continued past 700 million.

The state kept a separate record. The Presidential Committee, established in 2005, determined 1,006 collaborators in three rounds through 2009 and published a report of 25 volumes and some 21,000 pages. Unlike the civil-society dictionary, that list carries state certification.

The punishment did not last; only the record did

After liberation, Korea tried to punish. The Special Act on Punishment of Anti-National Acts passed in September 1948 and a Special Investigation Committee was formed. The outcome:

The decisive blow came before dawn on 6 June 1949, when police raided the committee's headquarters and disarmed its investigators. The committee was fully dissolved that October. What remained, where punishment did not, was the record. Without even that, nothing remains.

Where the dictionary can be consulted today

Access routes verified as of August 2026.

In short: there is no official free web service for searching the full dictionary. If you only need to confirm a name, the Wikipedia list and the state-certified list of 1,006 suffice. For an individual's documented conduct and the sources behind it, the paid app or the printed volumes are required.

A note on the slogan

"A people who forget their history have no future" is commonly attributed to the historian Shin Chae-ho, but the sentence has not been located in that form in his writings. It circulates widely without a confirmed source.

This section flies it anyway — not for its provenance but for what it demands. Write it accurately, correct it when wrong, keep it even when it is uncomfortable. Doubting the slogan's own source in the very first entry seems the honest way to begin a record.

Sources

• Wikipedia (ko) — Five Eulsa Traitors
• Wikipedia (ko) — Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators
• Wikipedia (ko) — List of persons in the dictionary
• Wikipedia (ko) — Report on Pro-Japanese Anti-National Acts
• National Institute of Korean History — Special Investigation Committee
• Encyclopedia of Korean Culture — the dictionary
• Institute for Research on National Issues — official app
• Newstapa data portal — dataset of the 1,006 certified collaborators