This gradual migration from Japan to the Hermit Kingdom continued during many centuries, promoting an intercourse between two races which the Government was powerless to frustrate. Japanese historians argue from this settlement in Korea that the State was a vassal of Japan from the second century by right of conquest and appropriation. The idea, which prevailed through seventeen centuries, was not finally rejected until the Ambassador of the Mikado signed a treaty at Seoul on February 7th, 1897, which recognised Korea as an independent nation. From about the beginning of the Christian era until the fifteenth century, the relations between Japan and Korea were very close. From this period onward Korea, although maintaining her attitude of complacent indifference to events outside her own Empire, betrayed signs of weakness in her policy of isolation when menaced with the importunate demands of her rival neighbours, China and Japan.
At the two points in her Empire adjacent to the dominions of China and Japan, war and peace alternately prevailed. If, upon occasion, the Koreans went out unsupported to fight their invaders, the leaders more usually united with one of the two rivals against the other. Thus, there was always turmoil throughout the kingdom. In the south, as in the north, the tide of war rolled backwards and forwards, with varying success. From the west, the armies of China appeared and vanished, skirting the Liao-tung Gulf, to plunder and to devastate the peninsula. Fleets from Shan-tung, crossing the Yellow Sea, dropped their anchors in the rivers of the land. The west was threatened by the hordes of China, and the south was harried by ships and men from the east, who pounced upon Fusan and seized the cities of the south. The aggressions of the Japanese
