history

Also recorded in the history of Japanese invasion of Korea is the murder of Empress Myongsong, also known as the Ulmi incident.

The Japanese militarists went to extremes in their moves to colonize Korea by force of arms in the late 19th century.

At that time, they harboured the wild ambition to seize before others Korea, an arena of competition for colonies among the US and other Western powers. But they failed to make headway towards the aim, as they were not strong enough to fight head-on with the powers. Moreover, Empress Myongsong of the Korean feudal government was following a pro-Russian policy with the intention of containing Japan with the help of Tsarist Russia since the Japanese were so ambitious to dominate Korea.

Estimating that they would be unable to colonize Korea without eliminating the Korean empress, the Japanese reactionary government hatched a plot to kill her.

They appointed Army Lieut General Miura Goro as the man fit for the job and dispatched him to Korea as a resident minister.

As they schemed to kill the empress, the crafty Japanese tried to fake an internal coup of the Korean feudal government in order to prevent protest from home and abroad and shift the blame for the crime.

At the dawn of October 8 1895, the outrage was committed under Miura’s command. The murderers involving the Japanese troops, police, rogues and pro-Japanese training corps shot to death the regiment commander of the Korean Royal Guard and broke into the imperial palace to search for the empress. Although they had got familiar with her appearance by means of her portrait, they found it difficult to spot her in the complete mess of numerous ladies-in-waiting running pell-mell while screaming. So they indiscriminately stabbed them to death, believing that the empress might be among the court ladies.

The palace turned into a slaughterhouse and sea of blood in a flash.

After identifying the empress bleeding and still breathing among the fallen ladies, they rolled her in a quilt, put it on a pile of firewood which had already been got ready in the nearby pine forest and burned her to death. And they threw the pieces of bones that remained unburned in a pond to remove the traces of their crime.

Empress Myongsong was killed brutally like this.

After murdering her to realize their aggressive goal, the Japanese imperialists became more undisguised in pursuing the colonial enslavement policy toward Korea and finally occupied the country militarily.

The Korean people are now closely watching the movement of the Japanese, who are scheming to repeat the bloody history, far from making an apology and reparations for the past crimes though well over 100 years have passed since then.