To adventurous Western writers and journalists in the late 19th century, the opening of Japan in 1868 was an opportunity too good to pass up. Japan represented a lost civilization, and by the end of the century, readers in Victorian England and Teddy Roosevelt's America had become fascinated with this ancient and highly civilized land that the modern, industrializing West knew next to nothing about.
Korea, by contrast, was considered a backwater. But geography had placed the Korean people between China and Czarist Russia on their northern borders, and the growing power and ambition of Japan just across the sea. When another power in the Pacific, the United States, invaded Kangwha Island in 1871, it marked the beginning of a long period of domination by and struggle against direct and indirect colonization by foreign powers, the results of which would keep Korea divided 135 years later.
On hand to record the struggles were a wide array of Western, Korean, and Japanese correspondents. Some, like famed author Jack London, came to Korea because that's where the action was. London, however, arrived too late to cover the main battles of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, and finding only frustration he ended up entertaining Seoul's foreign residents with a reading of his most famous work, "Call of the Wild."