JAPAN'S FOREIGN POLITICS
sensible of China's arbitrary and unfriendly interference in the peninsula. Twice the efforts of the Japanese Government to obtain redress for unlawful and ruinous tradal prohibitions issued by the Korean Authorities, had been thwarted by the action of the Chinese Resident in Söul; and once an ultimatum addressed from Tōkyō to the Korean Government in the sequel of long and vexatious delay, had elicited from the Viceroy Li in Tientsin an insolent threat of Chinese armed opposition. Still more strikingly provocative of national indignation was China's procedure with regard to the murder of Kim Ok-kyün, the leader of progress in Korea, who had been for some years a refugee in Japan. Inveigled from Japan to China by fellow countrymen sent from Söul to assassinate him, Kim was shot in a Japanese hotel in Shanghai, and China, instead of punishing the murderer, conveyed him, together with the corpse of his victim, in a warship of her own to Korea, the assassin to be publicly honoured, the body to be savagely mutilated. When, therefore, the insurrection of 1894 in Korea induced the Bin family again to solicit China's armed intervention, the Tōkyō Government concluded that, in the interests of Japan's security and of civilisation in the Orient, steps must be taken to put an end finally to the barbarous corruption and misrule which rendered Korea a scene of constant disturbance, offered incessant invitations to foreign aggression,
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