This topic was posted , thanks nickcarraway.
Sorry, I am a little late seeing this.
Posted on 11/23/2021 1:55:03 PM PST by nickcarraway
A former Japanese diplomat confessed to taking part in the 1895 assassination of Korean Empress Myeongseong, according to a Korean historian who examined recently discovered letters that provide a fresh account of the brutal slaying.
Also known as Queen Min, Myeongseong was the wife of Gojong, the 26th king of Joseon, a Korean dynastic kingdom, and was known as an influential figure in the palace.
In one of the letters, the diplomat proclaimed, “We killed the queen,” and went on to detail the circumstances surrounding the assassination.
The slaying, known as “the Eulmi Incident” in Korea, involved a group of people that included Japanese military officers, diplomats and civilians.
The group stormed Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, which was the royal palace of the dynasty, early on the morning of Oct. 8, 1895, and hacked the queen to death with a sword. After killing her, they doused her body with oil and burned it.
The assassination came after the queen sought help from Russia in her attempt to remove Japanese influence from Korea after the Triple Intervention in 1895. That was a diplomatic intervention by Russia, Germany and France over the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki.
Japan had imposed the treaty on the Qing Dynasty of China after emerging victorious from the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). But the diplomatic intervention forced Japan to return the Liaodong Peninsula to the Qing Dynasty, which it had acquired after the war, and weakened Japan’s influence in Korea.
Kumaichi Horiguchi (1865-1945), who was assistant consul in Korea, was the diplomat who wrote the eight recently unearthed letters.
He had sent the letters to Teisho Takeishi, his best friend in his hometown Nakadori (currently Nagaoka) in Niigata Prefecture, who was a scholar of Chinese classics. The letters are dated from Nov. 17, 1894, to Oct. 18, 1895--soon after the assassination.
Steve Hasegawa, a Nagoya-based expert on stamps, obtained the letters at an antique market.
Kim Moon-ja, a historian and the author of a book on the assassination, "Chosen Ohi Satsugai to Nihon-jin" (The killing of the Korean queen and the Japanese), analyzed the letters.
Horiguchi was identified as the author based on a number of factors, including the location in which the letters were originally kept, their contents, the postmarks and how the envelopes were made.
The sixth letter among the eight, dated Oct. 9, 1895, the day after the assassination, details what Horiguchi did on the day of the killing.
He revealed that the group of assailants stormed the rear part of the palace and murdered the queen.
“(Among the assassins), it was my role to enter,” the letter read. “Climbing up the wall … finally reaching the rear private royal residence, we killed the queen.”
He even described how he felt afterward.
“We were stunned as it (the assassination) was unexpectedly easy.”
The letters were written with a brush in a cursive style, using the traditional forms of Chinese characters (Kyujitai), as well as Japanese hiragana and katakana characters.
Kim said he believes the letters to be authentic.
“The details of the assassination and the accounts of his family in the letters convinced me that they are genuine letters written by Horiguchi,” he said.
“I got a raw feeling of shock reading that the then-incumbent diplomat was involved in the killing of the queen of the country to which he was sent. These are important documents that give us a key to unlocking the details behind the incident, of which much is still unknown.”
The letters written just prior to and after the assassination contradict other accounts of the incident given by people associated with it in later years.
It is believed that the assassins had planned to storm the palace, pretending to be protecting it and its most important people, under the guise of a fake “pro-Japan coup” led by Heungseon Daewongun, Gojong’s father. But in reality, they intended to kill the queen.
Horiguchi is believed to have been responsible for persuading the Daewongun to come to the palace from his residence, located in a suburb of Seoul, prior to the assassination.
The fifth of the eight letters is dated Oct. 7, 1895, the day before the assassination. In it, Horiguchi spoke of Chinese poems that the Daewongun had given him.
“I have visited Heungseon Daewongun, and we exchanged poems and prose many times over the past few days,” it said.
He described Daewongun's poems as being “unclear and incomprehensible.”
He also praised the Daewongun, saying he is “the best old hero of Korea and someone you can talk to,” and added that he is “funny and refined, a sly old man you somehow can’t describe.”
He also hinted about the upcoming incident by writing that a “huge disturbance might occur soon.”
While the passage addressing the Daewongun’s poems might at first seem insignificant, Kim said it is actually crucial evidence in understanding the event.
In his essays reflecting on the incident from the 1930s, about 40 years after the assassination, Horiguchi made public three Chinese poems written by the Daewongun and alleged that the Daewongun had confessed his will to launch a coup.
“However, the Daewongun’s Chinese poems, as shown in the recently uncovered letters written by Horiguchi, paint an entirely different picture,” Kim said. “People associated with the assassination, including Horiguchi, insisted after the incident that the Daewongun was the ringleader of the killing. These letters are important evidence in proving that their story was fiction.”
On Oct. 11, two days after he wrote the sixth letter, he also reported the incident to Takashi Hara, the then-vice minister of foreign affairs who would later become prime minister, in a private letter at the behest of his superior.
But while Horiguchi wrote that he had witnessed the killing and admitted to taking the Daewongun out of his residence with others, he only said that “the queen died” regarding the assassination, as if he were just a passive observer.
Previous research has also pointed to Horiguchi being one of the assailants, but it is still unknown just who attacked and murdered the queen with the weapon.
Sadatsuchi Uchida, the then-first consul in Korea, who was not informed of the assassination plan beforehand and dealt with its aftermath, said that a “certain lieutenant of the Imperial Japanese Army” had killed the queen in his letter sent to Hara on the day of the assassination.
Others have also been described as being responsible for killing the queen.
The assassins are thought to have planned to leave the palace before dawn, after the murder. But they instead committed the crime after dawn because the Daewongun was reluctant to leave his residence to come to the palace, and because the assassins, who were divided into two groups, failed to assemble at the proper time.
Because of the disorganization, many people witnessed the assassins leaving the place after the murder, which meant it was clear that Japanese were involved. But Horiguchi’s letters made no mention of this blunder.
“There are many memoirs written by Japanese who were involved in the assassination, but they contain both facts and fiction, with a lot of exaggeration,” Kim said.
“However, the accounts in Horiguchi’s newly discovered letters, although needing more study, are thought to be more trustworthy because they are private letters sent to his best friend in his hometown whom he trusted.”
Ping
“However, the Daewongun’s Chinese poems, as shown in the recently uncovered letters written by Horiguchi, paint an entirely different picture,” Kim said. “People associated with the assassination, including Horiguchi, insisted after the incident that the Daewongun was the ringleader of the killing. These letters are important evidence in proving that their story was fiction.”
I’m sure this is the first and last time in history that it will be found the history doesn’t match the facts. After all, we have it on good authority that elites never act to conceal their intent, and that every case where such is alleged is merely a baseless conspiracy theory.
Oh, and furthermore, Russia! Russia! Russia!, and Hunter’s laptop was hacked, and Kyle crossed state lines with an illegal gun to murder black people, Jan 6th was worse than the civil war, Epstein committed suicide, TWA800 crashed because of a mechanical failure, and Ron Brown’s plane went down due to the worst storm in a decade.
Japan and their war against the US and the UK was going to happen from this moment. Although an argument can be made for 1874 when Japan sized Okinawa but I will not go into that here.
Japan was determined to make the Pacific a Japanese lake which would mean taking over most of Asia and the west coast of the Americas.
Which was why they were establishing colonies up and down the coast and why, when WWII started those countries either confined or expelled the Japanese.
The Japanese were excessively cruel to their conquered, even shocking the Nazis who were no shrinking violets. They were quite interested in biological warfare and had conducted several experiments with weaponizing the plague. These experiments were successful and a plan to hit the US with it was planed for September of 1945. Code named Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night it would have spread the bacteria (Yersinia pestis) known to have caused the five greatest epidemics in human history during a time when the world was already in disarray.
The fact that WWII in Europe had pushed the US into creating the atomic bomb was the only thing that prevented it.
History you don't learn in school.
Interesting.
My father served in the Pacific (USMC) as did my uncle (also USMC)
He stated unequivocally that the “bomb” saved hundreds of thousands (or more) lives. Without the bomb an invasion of Japan would have had to take place. Uncountable casualties.
Who should be blamed for the civilian deaths from the bomb?
The Japanese.
But Imperial Japan was a real horror show.
You can go and read the notes from Unit 731 and you will find stuff that will haunt your dreams for the rest of your life.
There is a reason why their neighbors hate them and the reasons are valid. And likely will take another hundred years for those memories to go away.
Japan in its military dictatorship phase was brutal, that is for sure.
1. Japan was late (by 30 years) to the forcing of concessions on China. The Europeans were the first to demand concessions from China, and that process was not ignored by Japan.
2. Japan was late to establishing colonies in Asia. Again Japan was preceded in that by the Europeans and the U.S., and again Japan observed that and as Japan industrialized came to see it as European and American blocking actions against a modernizing Japan. In Southeast Asia the Europeans even admitted they were blocking recently industrializing Japan.
3. Looking out from Japan in WWI (when they were on our side) they saw an Asia largely occupied by the Europeans and Americans, from India all through Southeast Asia, up through the Philippines and the coast of China.
While HOW Japan came to deal and react to 1.,2. and 3. above is the subject of good criticism. That they did react to all that was not strange, even from a general Asian perspective. From a general Asian perspective the suddenly outward looking Japanese Empire was following on and reacting to the western colonization of so much of Asia.
I think the atomic bombs probably saved more Japanese than American lives.
Happy nightmares.
A conventional invasion of Japan where every Japanese down to the small children were indoctrinated into the idea that they must kill or die was going to be a horror.
A tour of Shuri Castle gives you an idea of how hard the war was going to become. It was leveled. In the Battle of Okinawa they were forcing Okinawan boys of fourteen onto the front lines.
How can you ask your men to shoot children?
How can you live with the casualties if you don't?
I have read them.
My comments are not specifically related to the incident in Korea or Korea-Japan relations in general, or the brutality of the Japanese military dictatorship. They are about the general conditions in Asia in the period when Japan was just about the only Asian nation modernizing and getting into real industrialization, which was also a period when so much of Asia was colonies occupied by western empires. Japanese were not the only Asians wondering at the time if the future of Asia was to be forever run by westerners. While WWII ended the Japanese adventures in empire building, it also began to lead to the end of western colonies in Asia as well. Had the latter not been true, there could have been a revival of some combination of Asian states to end western colonialism in Asia.
This topic was posted , thanks nickcarraway.
Sorry, I am a little late seeing this.
It was the hidden swordsman on the Grassy Knoll............
;^)
She was a victim of Male Supremacy! /s
https://www.google.com/search?q=polkadot+dress+rfk
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/patricia-elayn-neal-58201/
Missionaries usually get bad reputations by the atheistic press, but they usually know what is going on and are willing to report grass roots opinions and government atrocities.
The Japanese essentially made Korea their colony and were very repressive.
Ironically, Imperial Russia tried to defend the monarchs.
The Japanese Russian war a few years later not only was a precursor to World War II but was one of the causes of thr Russian revolution.
Don’t forget, the Russians eventually caused the Japanese to surrender to the U.S.
I would be interested in your thoughts on some claims that the Japanese balloons found over rural areas in the western US (during WWII) did have toxic biological agents—but that they were ineffective because they were in remote areas.
What did the atomic bomb have to do with it?
LOL.
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