Part 6

Summary: In the first five episodes of this series we reviewed the causes of the 1903 Russo-Japanese War; the circumstances leading up to the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Japan; the initial Russian thrust into Korea and the Japanese counterattack; the costly Russian victory at Chongjin; the beginning of the Russian drive on Wonsan and the assassination attempt on Japan’s Emperor Meiji-tenno; the Japanese victory at Sanpo; the Imperial Russian Navy’s campaign to choke off the shipping lanes between Japan’s home islands and the Japanese forces on the Korean Peninsula; the Potemkin mutiny; the turning of the tide of the ground war against Japan in the late spring and early summer of 1903; and the hard-fought offensive that enabled the Russian army to finally capture Wonsan. In this installment we’ll recount the August 1903 anti-Japanese riots in Seoul and the start of Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to spark cease-fire negotiations between Russia and Japan.

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Seoul was a cauldron of anger and political tension in early August of 1903. Its citizens seethed with deep if suppressed rage over the fact that their homeland’s ancient first city was being used as the nerve center for their Japanese oppressors’ colonial regime; their fellow Koreans elsewhere in the peninsula viewed its liberation as a critical step towards re-establishing Korea as an independent sovereign nation. Russian secret service agents working undercover in Seoul did their level best to foment anti-Japanese sentiment among its residents, knowing that if they pushed hard enough they could set off an uprising which would force the Imperial Japanese Army to divert troops from the war with Russia and thereby make it easier for the Czar’s ground forces to expand their foothold on Korean soil. A few of the more optimistic members of the Czar’s general staff were even beginning to hold out hope that the fall of Seoul might mark the first step toward an invasion of Japan’s home islands.

Not that Koreans needed much encouragement to hate the Japanese. Even before Russia went to war with Japan Korean nationalists had been waging an underground propaganda campaign intended to undermine the Japanese colonial regime. The war’s outbreak had encouraged some of the more militant factions of the nationalist movement to take up arms in the beginning of a fierce insurgency against the occupiers; as the fortunes of the Russian army waxed and waned on the battlefield with each successive engagement against the Imperial Japanese Army, so too did the guerrillas’ position rise or fall relative to how the ground war was proceeding for Japan.

With the capture of Wonsan by the Russians, the insurgents’ stock was once more on the upswing. As growing numbers of Japanese soldiers were transferred from the Seoul garrison to the northern front where thousands of their comrades-in-arms were getting ready to make a push to retake Wonsan from the Russian army, nationalist cells inside the  Korean capital became ever bolder in opposing Japanese colonial rule. A Tokyo newspaper correspondent visiting Seoul shortly after the fall of Wonsan to the Russians noted in his private journal: "The people in this city are like a great volcano, ready to erupt at any moment." The first warning signs of that eruption were seen on August 4^th when two of the largest nationalist factions in Korea organized what were known as "patriotic gatherings" in Seoul’s main square. As the demonstrators marched through the streets of the city they were confronted by a line of Japanese troops aiming rifles and machine guns directly at the main line of protestors.

The precise sequence of what happened next would be hotly debated by the survivors for decades afterwards. Most Japanese accounts of the ensuing riot blamed the violence on the demonstrators, claiming they’d thrown rocks and other objects at the soldiers and thereby forced them to open fire on the crowd; the Koreans, on the other hand, vehemently insisted the Japanese soldiers had fired on the demonstrators without provocation and thereby driven them to revolt in a burst of patriotic fury.¹ About the only significant detail anybody could agree on at the time was that the showdown between the soldiers and the protestors had turned violent just before high noon.

By 2:15 PM at least twenty people were dead and more than fifty Japanese-owned buildings had been damaged or destroyed in the unrest. The colonial occupation forces didn’t even wait to determined who had actually attacked the buildings in question before beginning to mete out punishment-- nearly two hundred Korean civilians were arrested at random and hauled off to detention centers. The lucky ones were merely subjected to degrading interrogations; in some cases detainees ended  up getting put against a wall and shot. There were also dark rumors of female prisoners being sexually assaulted by Japanese guards and at least one confirmed instance of a detainee being driven to suicide by the abuses of his jailers.

A second wave of riots struck Seoul late on the morning of August 7^th. What started out as a memorial service for the victims of the first riot turned into a protest rally and then became a frenzied attempt to storm the headquarters of the local Japanese Imperial Marine garrison; as the front edge of the crowd tried to scale the garrison walls machine gunners let them have it full blast. By the time the fusillade was over a scant five minutes later, at least half the protestors who’d attempted to enter the garrison were either dead or dying. As word of the massacre spread across the city and out to nearby towns, Korean nationalist cell leaders in Seoul were provoked to further sharpen the already vitriolic tenor of their propaganda against the Japanese; many Koreans who had previously been sitting on the proverbial fence where the nationalist movement was concerned were moved to join its ranks and attack symbols of Japanese power wherever and whenever the opportunity arose to lash out at such symbols.

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Thousands of miles away from the unrest in Seoul and the fighting between the Japanese and Russian armies in northern Korea, a certain former New York City police commissioner was contemplating the thorny problem of how to persuade the Russians and the Japanese to come to the peace table. The man in question was Theodore Roosevelt, then in the middle of his first term as President of the United States. While not quite yet the superpower she would later become, America did have substantial commercial and political interests in the Far East which were being put in increasing jeopardy with every day that the Russo- Japanese War dragged on; a few of Roosevelt’s senior diplomatic and military advisors even expressed concerns that the United States might eventually get pulled into the hostilities.

Though hardly anyone’s idea of a shrinking violet, by the same token neither was Roosevelt all that eager to engage in unnecessary bloodshed; the memory of the carnage he’d experienced in Cuba as the commander of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War still haunted him, and if there were any possible way to end the hostilities between Russia and Japan before those hostilities widened to involve other countries, he was going to take it. So he rounded up his most senior diplomatic advisors for a special meeting on August 9^th to get their ideas for the framework of a cease-fire agreement. He also sent telegrams to the British foreign ministry in London and the French foreign ministry in Paris seeking their aid in coaxing Czar Nicholas II and Emperor Meiji to the conference table.

Initially Roosevelt’s efforts to get cease-fire discussions started were greeted with skepticism-- particularly in the Winter Palace, where Nicholas II’s entourage regarded the Roosevelt peace proposals as little more than a Canute-like attempt to prevent the figurative tide from coming in. But as TR’s fellow Americans had learned before the war Roosevelt could be very persuasive, not to mention persistent, when he put his mind to it, and on August 24^th the Russian foreign ministry telegraphed its embassy in Washington with instructions to notify the White House that Czar Nicholas II was  ready to accept the president’s mediation offer. Four days later the Japanese government signaled that it too was ready to enter cease- fire negotiations. On September 7^th steamships carrying the Russian and Japanese negotiating teams arrived in San Francisco and were met by details of police and National Guardsmen dispatched to the city at President Roosevelt’s request to maintain security for the cease- fire talks and make sure the negotiators received safe passage to their respective hotels.

Had it not been for the presence of Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay, the cease-fire discussions might have ended almost as soon as they began. In his opening remarks, the chief Japanese negotiator spent most of his allotted speaking time re-hashing old accusations about alleged Russian mistreatment of Japanese prisoners of war; the head Russian negotiator took exception to this claim and a shouting match ensued which only Hay was able to defuse. The first day of negotiations concluded with the two sides barely even still  on speaking terms.

The Imperial Court back in Tokyo watched the conference in San Francisco with a nervous eye. Japan’s military situation, precarious even before the cease-fire negotiations began, showed every indication of deteriorating still further. From the point of view of the Emperor and his most senior military advisors, it was critical that a peace accord be worked out at the soonest possible moment-- the longer the war dragged on, the greater the chances were of Russia being able to finally attempt an invasion of the Japanese home islands. As the top aide to Emperor Meiji’s naval minister would recall in his memoirs years later: "His Majesty was deeply concerned that if the conflict between ourselves and the Russian Empire continued another six months, Tokyo itself might well become a battlefield...and this was something he devoutly believed must be avoided no matter what the cost."²

Czar Nicholas II was just as anxious to get a deal concluded, for somewhat different reasons. With Japanese forces on the run in Korea and Japan in dire economic straits at home, he believed that this was the perfect time to pressure Tokyo into settling matters on terms that would be most favorable to Russia. If Japan were able to get a second wind on the battlefield, the circumstances of the negotiations might be altered and the onus would be on his government to make concessions to the Japanese. In boxing terms, the Czar saw that Japan was on the ropes, and he was eager to score the knockout punch the first chance he got. The only question was whether that punch would be delivered at the negotiating table or on the battlefield....