During the Meiji period, Japan has taken a huge leap into westernizing the country. The leap of Japan’s extensive westernization had outstandingly form an uprising position along with the Western power, establishing a stronger industrial world power. This transformation gave Japan a new global sense to render the ripe for colonization (Dudden, 2006). During the Meiji Restoration period, Japan always had plans to control Korea as a part of expanding the colonial empire. However, Korea was formerly seized in the eyes of the three dominant countries such as China, Russia, and Japan as a colony. In 1894-95, the Sino-Japanese War between Japan and China demonstrated Japan’s powerful military strength as Japan defeated China. The defeat of China essentially strengthened Japan’s position of the imperial powers. Despite the loss of China and its position with Korea, there was still Russian dominance in Korean which stopped Japanese from the establishment in Korea. This issue further led to a war between the Russian and Japanese called the Russo-Japanese War as Japan was determined to utterly take control of Korea. Because of the sustain military power of Japan and it supports from Britain, Japan was able to triumph Russia successfully , which broke diplomatic relation of Korea and Russia (Myers & Peattie, 1984). This resulted the Japan power to annexing a treaty with Korea assigning Korea as a colony of the Japanese empire. In 1907, the Japanese urgently demanded the current Korean Emperor Gojong to get off stage and abdicate his son, Sunjong. When Emperor Sunjong took over his father’s position, the Japan-Korea Treaty was immediately signed, resulting the Korean government no longer in control but instead under Japan’s command. This formalized gave the Japanese Resident-General the authority to take possession of Korea’s internal administration. By 1910, Japan effectively took action and annexed Korea as a colony (Green, 2013). This ended Korea 's independence and Japan is officially in control of Korea. During the first ten years of Japan 's colonial policy in Korea, there was a massive shift on Korea among the changes in the cultural, political and economic side. At the beginning of the colonization, the Japanese were awfully harsh to the Koreans. The government treated the Koreans as a group of downtrodden people with no culture respect towards the nation. Under Japanese imperialism, Koreans were striving to maintain their culture because Japan was constantly trying to deprive the Korean cultural identity. During the beginning of the colonial period, the Japanese government immediately took action on reforming the education system in order to eliminate the Korean national identity. The primary objective of the Japanese towards the education policy was to incorporate Koreans to learn Japanese without any discrimination. The Japanese took control of the Korean educational system and separated the Koreans from assessing any form of Korean language and history. Koreans were forced to acknowledge Japanese language and was required to surrender their Korean surnames into a Japanese one (Rhee, 1992). Moreover, Korean textbooks and newspapers were entirely banned and a majority of private …show more content…
From the first decade to the second decade, the effectiveness of the two policies was highly neutral. The effectiveness was not an efficient uprising drift, as subsequently Korea was still under Japanese colonial. However, the changes from the two decades did slightly benefit a stronger pathway to the Korean independence as Korea was able to be recognized among the international politics. The changing policies converted an effective catalyst towards establishment more liberty. Regardless of the political and cultural issues in the second decade, it positively softened and reinforces less violent and