Did Korea provide Japanese security?

Did Korea provide essential strategic security for Japan?

Not to the degree later claimed; food supply mattered, but imperial ambition was a major driver.

Later Japanese accounts exaggerated Korea's immediate value as an indispensable defensive shield. Control of the peninsula could certainly affect Japan's position, and Korean agriculture mattered to its food supply. Those interests did not make conquest an unavoidable act of self-defense in 1894. The larger explanation was a deliberate desire for empire, with security language helping later narratives make expansion appear necessary.