Some Japanese politicians and scholars, including former prime minister Fumio Kishida, deny that Koreans were forced laborers, and instead claim that they were "requisitioned against their will" to work.

The documents included the testimony of King Gojong, several witnesses of the assassination, and Karl Ivanovich Weber's report to Aleksey Lobanov-Rostovsky, the Foreign Minister of Russia, by Park Jonghyo.

[37] According to a Russian eyewitness, Seredin-Sabatin, an employee of the king, a group of Japanese agents entered Gyeongbokgung,[38] killed Queen Min, and desecrated her body in the north wing of the palace.

They advocated a number of societal reforms, including democracy and a constitutional monarchy, and pushed for closer ties to Western countries in order to counterbalance Japanese influence.

[44] Frustrated by this, King Gojong invited Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who was on a tour of Asian countries with William Howard Taft, to the Imperial Palace on 20 September 1905, to seek political support from the United States despite her diplomatic rudeness.

[72] The committee supported the theory of a Japanese colony on the Korean Peninsula called Mimana,[72] which, according to E. Taylor Atkins, is "among the most disputed issues in East Asian historiography.

[76] The royal palace Gyeongbokgung was partially destroyed beginning in the 1910s, in order to make way for the Japanese General Government Building as well as the colonial Chōsen Industrial Exhibition.

[82] Due to a waterway construction permit, in the small town of Wanpaoshan in Manchuria near Changchun, "violent clashes" broke out between the local Chinese and Korean immigrants on 2 July 1931.

[86][87] From 1939, labor shortages as a result of conscription of Japanese men for the military efforts of World War II led to organized official recruitment of Koreans to work in mainland Japan, initially through civilian agents, and later directly, often involving elements of coercion.

Historian Philip Jowett noted that during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the Gando Special Force "earned a reputation for brutality and was reported to have laid waste to large areas which came under its rule.

Other enticements were false advertising for nursing jobs at outposts or Japanese army bases; once recruited, they were incarcerated in comfort stations both inside their nations and abroad.

[134] Hirofumi Hayashi at the University of Manchester argues that the resolution has helped to counter the "arguments of ultrarightists flooding the mainstream mass media" and warned against the rationalization of the comfort women system.

The KPO planned a number of attacks on Japanese government and colonial officials, including a 1932 assassination attempt on Emperor Hirohito and a bombing at a military rally in Shanghai.

[148] In the village of Teigan, Suigen District, Keiki Prefecture (now Jeam-ri, Hwaseong, Gyeongggi Province) for example, a group of 29 people were gathered inside a church which was then set afire.

[153] There were 13 provinces in Korea during Japanese rule: Keiki-dō, Kōgen-dō, Chūseihoku-dō, Chūseinan-dō, Zenrahoku-dō, Zenranan-dō, Keishōhoku-dō, Keishōnan-dō, Heian'nan-dō, Heianhoku-dō, Kōkai-dō, Kankyōnan-dō, and Kankyōhoku-dō.

Seoul became the first city in East Asia to have electricity, trolley cars, water, telephone, and telegraph systems all at the same time,[159] but Korea remained a largely backward agricultural economy around the start of the 20th century.

[164] According to scholar Donald S. Macdonald, "for centuries most Koreans lived as subsistence farmers of rice and other grains and satisfied most of their basic needs through their own labor or through barter.

Cha primarily attributed this deterioration to global economic shocks and laissez-faire policies, as well as Chōsen's rapid population growth; the colonial government's attempts to mitigate this problem were inadequate.

[161]In addition, 70% of the agricultural workers who made up most of Korea's population at the time were reduced to tenants of Japanese and Korean landlords who purchased land at low prices, and they had to pay high rents of 50–70%.

This infrastructure was intended not only to facilitate a colonial mercantilist economy, but was also viewed as a strategic necessity for the Japanese military to control Korea and to move large numbers of troops and materials to the Chinese border at short notice.

As opposed to other occupied countries, Koreans were nominally granted Japanese citizenship, including passports, but they were denied basic rights like freedom of speech, assembly, and an independent press.

Though public education was made available for elementary schools during Japanese rule, Korea as a country did not experience secondary-school enrollment rates comparable to those of Japan prior to the end of World War II.

The Japanese administrative policy shifted more aggressively towards cultural assimilation in 1938 (Naisen ittai) with a new government report advising reform to strengthen the war effort.

[212] Sungnyemun, the gate in Gyeongsong that was a symbol of Korea, was altered by the addition of large, Shinto-style golden horns near the roofs, later removed by the South Korean government after independence.

[214] In 2010, Prime Minister of Japan Naoto Kan expressed "deep remorse" for the removal of artifacts,[215] and arranged an initial plan to return the Royal Protocols of the Joseon Dynasty and over 1,200 other books, which was carried out in 2011.

Communist concepts, such as class struggle, and its partner nationalist movement were resonating well with some of the peasants and lower-class citizens of Chōsen; this was worrying to some missionaries because of communism's atheist components.

Comfort women were often recruited from rural locales with the promise of factory employment; business records, often from Korean subcontractees of Japanese companies, showed them falsely classified as nurses or secretaries.

Lee Se-il, leader of the investigation, said that examination of the military prosecution reports for 15 Korean prison guards, obtained from The National Archives of the United Kingdom, confirmed that they were convicted without explicit evidence.

[254] In 2006 South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun appointed an investigation commission into the issue of locating descendants of pro-Japanese collaborators from the times of the 1890s until the collapse of Japanese rule in 1945.

Denial and beautification of this history disturbs the efforts of its surviving victims to distance themselves from this past, and serves as a painful reminder of Japan's unwillingness to accept responsibility for the injustices that Japanese rule inflicted upon them.