history

The “Ulsa Five-Point Treaty” was a document the Japanese imperialists cooked up to establish colonial domination over Korea. 

Japan had intensified the moves to invade Korea for a long time with an ambition to reduce it to its colony. 

After provoking the Unyogo incident in 1875, it forced the Korean feudal government to conclude the aggressive and unequal “Kanghwado treaty”. 

Later, through the Sino-Japanese war and Russo-Japanese war, it created conditions for having exclusive dominion over Korea, before dispatching special envoy Ito Hirobumi to Korea in November 1905.

He produced a letter of the Japanese king before the Korean emperor Kojong and tried to compel him to conclude the gangster-like “treaty”. But Kojong vehemently rejected the request, saying that he could not allow it, because if he allowed it, it would mean his country’s ruin.

Then the Japanese imperialists began to mobilize their military power. After encircling the inside and outside of the imperial palace with many troops, the aggressors conducted military drills in front of the palace. In such an atmosphere, a royal council meeting on the matter of the “treaty” took place in the emperor’s presence in the imperial palace on November 17, in which ministers of the Korean feudal government decided to refuse to conclude the “treaty”.

Upon hearing the news that the negotiations came to a rupture, Ito Hirobumi went into the palace and forced the ministers of the Korean feudal government to gather in a room and tried to press them to approve the “treaty”.

When several ministers expressed disagreement, Ito threatened and pressurized them openly, and even ordered his lackeys to kill them if they did not give in.

After fabricating the “treaty” by such a coercive method, the Japanese imperialists unilaterally declared that the “treaty” was concluded. They were so base as to unhesitatingly steal the seal of the foreign minister and stamp it on the “treaty” to “legitimize” it.

The “Harvard Report” of 1935 defined the “Ulsa Five-Point Treaty” as illegal and put forward as the reason the forced conclusion of it by mobilizing the Japanese troops. A report submitted to the 15th UN International Law Commission in 1963 also defined the treaty as the result of duress or act of threat and as absolutely invalid. 

With such an illegal document, the Japanese imperialists seized the sovereignty of Korea and subjected its people to colonial slavery for decades.

The human, material and mental damage the Japanese imperialists inflicted upon the Korean people during their military occupation of Korea is so enormous and absolutely intolerable.

The Korean people will surely settle accounts with Japan for its past crimes.