history

It is nearly 150 years since Japan provoked the Unyogo incident.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Japan advocated the “theory of the conquest of Korea” to conquer Korea by force of arms and, as its first stage, sent warships like the Unyogo to Korea for espionage and military display from the spring of 1875.

In the autumn of 1875, the Unyogo intruded into the Korean territorial waters again on the pretext of surveying a shipping route to the Qing dynasty and approached a point of military importance in defiance of the demand of the Korean feudal government for withdrawing immediately.

But as they could not break through the defence of the Korean army, the Japanese aggressors turned their route and made an assault on island villages without any defensive facilities, massacring residents and committing plunder and arson. Therefore, outraged Korean troops drove them out.

This is the truth behind the Unyogo incident.

However, the crafty and tyrannical aggressors threatened the Korean feudal government, saying that they would dispatch an envoy to inquire about the incident and that if it did not accept him, they would make an armed attack on Korea. Finally in early 1876, Japan forced the Korean feudal government into signing the Kanghwado treaty.

The treaty stipulated the enforcement of extraterritoriality of Japanese in Korea, the exemption of the Japanese goods from customs duties, the circulation of the Japanese currency and so on, which threw Korea into a whirlpool of Japan’s semicolonization.

The illegality of the treaty, which was fabricated by dint of military threat, is beyond doubt.

After thoroughly enforcing their enslavement policy over Korea on the pretext of the treaty, the Japanese imperialists deprived Korea of its diplomatic right by cooking up the Ulsa five-point treaty in 1905 and its right to home administration by concocting the Jongmi seven-point treaty in 1907, and reduced the country to their complete colony by forging the Korea-Japan annexation treaty in 1910.

It has been nearly 80 years since militaristic Japan, which had maintained its existence with aggression and plunder, was defeated.

However, Japan has made neither sincere soul-searching nor apology for its crime-ridden past, but is making reckless moves to repeat the blood-stained past.

It is hell-bent on becoming a military power to realize its old dream of the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere”, while joining a military alliance which destroys regional peace and stability.

If Japan takes the road of re-invasion, it will lead itself to self-destruction.