Lee Wan-Yong was a Korean minister, who signed the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty, which placed Korea under de facto Japanese occupation in 1910. Born to a prominent family in Gyeonggi-do province, Lee spent three years in the United States from 1887-1891, and thus had a more international outlook and experience than many of his contemporaries. He belonged to the ‘reform faction’ which wanted to westernize Korea and to open the country to foreign trade, and was thus considered to be ‘pro-Japanese’. Lee was a prominent government minister at the time of Eulsa Treaty of 1905, and was the most outspoken supporter of the pact which made the Korean Empire a protectorate of the Empire of Japan, thus stripping it of its diplomatic sovereignty. The treaty was signed in defiance of Korean Emperor Gojong, and he is thus accounted to be the chief of five ministers (including Park Jae-soon, Lee Ji-yong, Lee Geun-taek, Gwon Joong-hyun) who were later denounced as traitors in Korea. Under Japanese Resident-GeneralIto Hirobumi, Lee was promoted to the post of prime minister from 1906-1910. Lee was instrumental in forcing Emperor Gojong to abdicate in 1907, after Emperor Gojong tried to publicly denounce the Eulsa Treaty at the second international Hague Peace Convention. In 1910, Lee signed the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty by which Japan took full control over Korea, despite the objections of Korean Emperor Sunjong. For his cooperation with the Japanese, Lee was rewarded with a peerage in the Japanese kazoku system, becoming a hakushaku (Count), in 1910, which was raised to the title of kōshaku (Marquis) in 1921. He died in 1926. After the independence of Korea at the end of World War II, the grave of Lee was dug up and his remains suffered the posthumous dismemberment, which is often considered to be the most disgraceful punishment in Confucian ideology. Lee Wan-Yong's name has almost become synonymous to that of ‘traitor’ in modern Korea. However, Lee never learned to speak Japanese. He sought the road to independence and became the founder member of the Independence Club established in 1896. In fact, Seo Jae-pil's Dongnip Sinmun (Independence Newspaper) never wrote a single line of criticism against him. [1]Special law to redeem pro-Japanese collaborators' property was enacted in 2005 and the committee confiscated the property[2] of the descendants of nine people, including Lee, who collaborated with Japan when the Korean peninsula was colonized in 1910.[3] The enormous land and wealth of Lee's descendants' in postwar times were also confiscated.
