In the years 1869–73, the "Seikanron" ("Conquer Korea Argument") had bitterly divided the Japanese elite between one faction that wanted to conquer Korea immediately vs. another that wanted to wait until Japan was more modernized before embarking on a war to conquer Korea; significantly no one in the Japanese elite ever accepted the idea that the Koreans had the right to be independent, with only the question of timing dividing the two factions. In much the same way that Europeans used the "backwardness" of African and Asian nations as a reason for why they had to conquer them, for the Japanese elite the "backwardness" of China and Korea was proof of the inferiority of those nations, thus giving the Japanese the "right" to conquer them.