The Day They Were Told — 29 August 1910

The country changed hands on 22 August. People learned of it on 29 August.

The eight days in between are the subject of this entry.

Eight days

Yi Wan-yong and Terauchi Masatake sealed the treaty on the afternoon of 22 August. The document was complete; only effect remained. And yet nothing was announced.

What the Government-General did with those eight days was not prepare an announcement but foreclose a reaction. Newspapers were controlled, political assembly banned, senior ministers effectively confined. The work was to ensure that when the news broke there would be no one on the streets to organise it.

Those eight days were calculated. They were not the time required to hand over a country, but the time required to make sure nothing happened afterwards.

29 August

An imperial rescript was proclaimed that day in Sunjong's name. Yi Wan-yong had Yun Deok-yeong apply the seal.

This document was treated in an earlier entry. In brief: the seal impressed was not the state seal but the administrative Chikmyeongjibo, and the signature 'Cheok' — which Sunjong had placed on every rescript since 1907 — is absent. This is the basis of the nullity argument, and also the point on which scholars have not agreed.

The Government-General of Korea was established the same day, with Terauchi, the last resident-general, as its first governor-general. The name "Korean Empire" ended that day.

Those who learned

Closing my book beneath the autumn lamp, I think back over the ages —
how hard it is in this world to be a man who knows how to read.
秋燈掩卷懷千古 難作人間識字人

Ten days or so from the proclamation. It happened the moment the silence built over eight days was broken.

Why "national humiliation"

The day has carried several names. Japan called it the annexation. We call it Gyeongsul Gukchi — the humiliation of losing the country in the gyeongsul year.

The word humiliation catches. There is a question whether it is right for the invaded to speak of shame.

This record does not hold the answer. But one can guess what the people who chose that name were carrying. It is likely a name given to themselves by those who judged that blaming others alone leads nowhere.

What the eight days say

There is a reason this record treats 29 August separately from 22 August.

The country changed hands on the 22nd, but it became a fact on the 29th. A treaty no one knows of is only paper; rule begins once people know. Japan spent eight days because it understood this exactly. Domination rests not on documents but on acknowledgement.

So those eight days are not empty time. They are time managed so as not to be known. From its first day, this country learned that what is disclosed, and when, is itself an instrument of rule.

Here too is a reason to keep records. Unless we write down who knew what and when — and when they did not know — all that remains is a single sheet of treaty.

Sources

• Encyclopedia of Korean Culture — the annexation treaty
• Wikisource — full text of the treaty
• National Institute of Korean History — the annexation