Overlooked No More: Yu Gwan-sun, a Korean Independence Activist Who Defied Japanese Rule

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/obituaries/overlooked-yu-gwan-sun.html

Overlooked No More: Yu Gwan-sun, a Korean Independence Activist Who Defied Japanese Rule

When a call for peaceful protests came in spring 1919, a schoolgirl became the face of a nation’s collective yearning for freedom.

Yu Gwan-sun took an active part in the March 1, 1919, independence movement against Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Dying in prison at 17, she became a national hero.

By Inyoung Kang      March 28, 2018

Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people.

SEOUL, South Korea — When a call for peaceful protests in support of Korean independence came in spring 1919, a 16-year-old girl named Yu Gwan-sun became the face of a nation’s collective yearning for freedom.

Yu was a student at Ewha Haktang in Seoul, which was established by American missionaries as the first modern educational institution for women in Korea. On March 1, 1919, Yu and four classmates joined others taking to the streets with cries of “Mansei!” (“Long live Korean independence!”) in one of the earliest protests against Japanese colonial rule. Amid the demonstration, the Declaration of Independence — written by the publisher Choe Nam-seon and signed by 33 Korean cultural and religious leaders — was recited at Seoul’s Pagoda Park.

The next day, protest organizers came to Ewha Haktang and encouraged Yu and her peers to join a student demonstration to be staged in three days. On March 5, she and her classmates marched at Namdaemun, a gate in central Seoul. They were detained by the Japanese authorities, but missionaries from the school negotiated their release.

The colonial government retaliated quickly, ordering all schools closed on March 10. A few days later, Yu returned to her hometown, Cheonan, about 53 miles south of Seoul in South Chungcheong Province, with a smuggled copy of the Declaration of Independence. She went from village to village spreading word of the Samil (literally “three-one,” or March 1) Movement and rallying local residents to organize their own protests.

The movement quickly took hold. Early on April 1, 3,000 people gathered at Aunae, a marketplace in Cheonan. Yu was there, distributing homemade taegeukgi, or Korean national flags, and giving speeches calling for independence. The Japanese military police arrived and fired on the crowd, killing 19 people. Yu’s parents were among the dead.

By the time the authorities quashed the protests a few weeks later, an estimated two million people out of a population of 20 million had participated in 1,542 pro-independence marches, according to Djun Kil Kim, author of “The History of Korea.” More than 7,000 people had been killed, and about 46,000, including Yu, had been jailed. After being convicted of sedition, she was sent to Seodaemun Prison in Seoul.

At Seodaemun, Yu demanded the release of other prisoners and continued to express her support for Korean independence. She shouted at her Japanese captors and, with other inmates, organized a large-scale protest on the first anniversary of the March 1 Movement.

“Even if my fingernails are torn out, my nose and ears are ripped apart, and my legs and arms are crushed, this physical pain does not compare to the pain of losing my nation,” she wrote in prison. “My only remorse is not being able to do more than dedicating my life to my country.”

She was eventually transferred to an underground cell, where she was repeatedly beaten and tortured for speaking out. “Japan will fall,” she wrote shortly before dying of her injuries on Sept. 28, 1920, at 17.

Yu was born on Dec. 16, 1902, the second daughter of five children to Christian parents near Cheonan, in what became South Korea when the peninsula was divided in 1945, after World War II.

She was influenced by her father, who taught her about Christianity and instilled traditional Confucian values of nationalism and civic awareness. Nine members of the Yu family — spanning three generations — were involved in the independence movement.

Yu was an intelligent child who attended a nearby Methodist church and memorized Bible verses easily, according to curators at the Ewha Museumin Seoul. An American missionary, Alice J. Hammond Sharp, encouraged Yu to attend the Ewha school to advance her education, something few Korean women did at that time.

The Korean Peninsula came under Japanese military rule three years after Yu was born. It was formally annexed in 1910, the start of a 35-year struggle for independence. Yu would not have remembered a free Korea, and she died long before liberation in August 1945.

The March 1 Movement did not immediately result in Korea’s independence, but it crystallized a sense of national unity and was a catalyst for the resistance. Today, March 1 is a national holiday in South Korea, where the 100th anniversary of the movement will be commemorated next year.

In August 2015, Yukio Hatoyama, a onetime leader of Japan, visited Seodaemun, which is now a national museum.

“As a former prime minister, as a Japanese citizen and as a human being,” Hatoyama said, “I am here today to offer my sincere apologies, from the bottom of my heart, to those who were tortured and were killed here.”

Hatoyama knelt and observed a moment of silence before a monument to colonial-era independence activists. He also visited a prison cell where Yu had been held. It was the first time a former Japanese prime minister had visited the site.

Yu was also honored by the former United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who received an honorary doctorate from Ewha in 2015.

“I want to speak about a great young Korean woman who lost her own freedom so that others could be free,” Ban said at a ceremony at the university, likening Yu to Joan of Arc. “This is proof that violence can kill a person, but not their memory, not their ideals. Her patriotism demonstrates the great way she lived and died.”

Choonkyu Lee contributed research.

A Real Path to Peace on the Korean Peninsula By Chung-in Moon

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-korea/2018-04-30/real-path-peace-korean-peninsula?sp_mid=56580751&sp_rid=ZHN5aHVuQHlhaG9vLmNvbQS2&spMailingID=56580751&spUserID=ODcxODMxNTY1NDIS1&spJobID=1401354510&spReportId=MTQwMTM1NDUxMAS2

A Real Path to Peace on the Korean Peninsula
The Progress and Promise of the Moon-Kim Summit

By Chung-in Moon
April 30, 2018

Twelve hours in Panmunjom—the village in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea that has long symbolized division and war—produced an unexpected miracle of peace on Friday. In the Panmunjom Declaration, Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un, the leaders of South and North Korea, pledged that “there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula and thus a new era of peace has begun.” Given North Korea’s military provocations, the growing North Korean nuclear arsenal, and the acute sense of crisis that has haunted South Koreans over the last year, such a reversal looks surreal. But after attending all three summits between the two Koreas (in 2000, 2007, and 2018), I believe that this latest one represents real progress and lays the groundwork for lasting peace.

Although much commentary has focused on the remaining difficulties, which are considerable, it has missed just how much was accomplished last week. Moon and Kim did not just make high-level commitments; they also laid out specific timetables for implementing them and took concrete steps that will have immediate effects in facilitating cooperation and preventing conflict. That offers cause for hope that for all the remaining challenges, a comprehensive peace deal including real denuclearization by North Korea is achievable in a couple of years, if not in the months ahead.

ENDING THE KOREAN WAR

The tangible outcomes of the summit are significant. It successfully normalized inter-Korean relations, and the two leaders agreed to “hold dialogue and negotiations in various fields including at a high level, and to take active measures to implement the agreements reached at the Summit.” They will establish a joint liaison office with resident representatives from both sides and encourage active cooperation, exchanges, visits, and contacts at all levels. They also agreed to proceed with reunion programs for families split between North and South Korea, on the occasion of National Liberation Day on August 15. And there will be practical steps to connect and modernize railways and roads, building on a 2007 agreement.

The summit also produced a watershed agreement to alleviate military tension and eliminate the danger of war on the Korean Peninsula. Both leaders agreed to completely cease all hostile acts against each other in every domain, including land, air, and sea, and to transform the demilitarized zone into a peace zone. They pledged to turn the areas around the Northern Limit Line in the West Sea into a maritime peace zone, in order to prevent accidental military clashes. They also committed to military measures, including launching a joint military committee to ensure active cooperation, exchanges, visits, and frequent meetings between military authorities and defense ministers.

The Panmunjom Declaration further included a historic joint commitment to cooperate in establishing a permanent and solid peace regime on the Korean Peninsula, ending the current state of armistice that has persisted since fighting stopped in the Korean War more than 60 years ago. As part of these efforts, the leaders agreed to carry out disarmament in a phased manner, through the reduction of military tensions and confidence-building measures, and to pursue three-party meetings, involving North Korea, South Korea, and the United States, or four-party meetings, involving China as well, within the year. The aim would be to declare an end to the war and to turn the armistice into a peace treaty. Finally, and most important of all, the South and North Korean leaders confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear weapons–free Korean Peninsula.

BREAKING GROUND

For all the real importance of such commitments, the significance of the summit goes well beyond them. Past agreement and declarations have never included such bold goals. The two leaders were able to narrow a long-standing gap: the South has generally favored a functionalist approach based on the logic of “economy first,” but the North has insisted on “military-political issues first.” Panmunjom was the first inter-Korean summit in which the two sides converged on the primacy of military-political issues.

The adoption of a written agreement on complete denuclearization was also groundbreaking. In the past, North Korea has refused to accept the nuclear issue as an agenda item in inter-Korean talks, arguing that it is a matter solely for the United States and North Korea to address. This time, Kim made a written commitment, and Rodong Sinmun, the official daily newspaper of the Workers’ Party of Korea, openly reported agreement on complete denuclearization, which is unprecedented. Underscoring his commitment to complete denuclearization, Kim told Moon that he would close the North’s still usable nuclear test sites in Punggye-ri in May, inviting experts and journalists from the United States and South Korea to observe and verify.

Throughout the meeting, Kim was pragmatic and realistic. He did not mention the reduction or withdrawal of U.S. forces in South Korea, or the status of the U.S.–South Korean alliance, as a precondition for denuclearization. “Once we start talking,” Kim said, “the U.S. will know that I am not a person to launch nuclear weapons at South Korea, the Pacific, and the U.S.” He also identified to Moon what he wants from Washington: frequent meetings and trust building, an official end to the Korean War, and a nonaggression treaty. If these conditions are met, he added, “why would we have nuclear weapons and suffer?” That is why he wanted to link denuclearization to the process of ending war and building a peace regime. As the final declaration says, if the process of ending the Korean War and transforming the armistice into a peace treaty occurs, the North will expedite efforts to denuclearize.

Finally, recognizing the mistakes in past agreements, both leaders made precise concrete pledges to implement what they agreed to. The dates for major meetings and events were specified in the declaration, with high-level talks and a general-level military meeting already scheduled in May. The reunion of separated families will take place on August 15. And Moon is scheduled to visit Pyongyang in the fall.

ROCKY ROAD AHEAD

What made such success possible? First, the summit never would have happened without Kim’s strategic decision to engage; he initiated and engineered the encounter. He presumably did so partly because he needed economic concessions from the South (he emphasized in his New Year’s speech that he will push for economic development even at the expense of nuclear weapons) and partly because he wanted to utilize Moon to secure access to the Trump administration. But also critical was Moon’s sincerity, open-mindedness, and willingness to play the role of honest broker between Pyongyang and Washington, which he demonstrated during the North Korean delegation’s visit to Seoul during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics earlier this year. (Seoul also worked hard to persuade the North’s officials through numerous clandestine contacts.) Finally, U.S. President Donald Trump’s combination of “maximum pressure” on Kim and timely encouragement of Moon’s approach to the North helped bring the two leaders together.

Yet as many observers have aptly pointed out, there is a rocky road ahead. However comprehensive the Panmunjom Declaration, it will not be easy to transform long-standing Korean conflict into a lasting peace. Reducing military tensions, building confidence, and finding agreement on arms reduction are challenging and time-consuming tasks, especially for archrivals.

The same will be true when it comes to the denuclearization of North Korea. Although the North, the South, and the United States all understand denuclearization as the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of nuclear weapons, they differ in the sequencing. Whereas the U.S. position is “CVID first and reward later,” the North demands an incremental, synchronized exchange of denuclearization and reward. South Korea advocates an eclectic approach, in which North Korea’s credible commitment to and actions toward denuclearization would be followed by step-by-step implementation of declaration, inspection, and verifiable dismantling in a compressed time frame.

The critical question is whether Kim is truly willing to get rid of his nuclear facilities, materials, and bombs in a verifiable, irreversible way. Skeptics contend that he will use “salami tactics,” insisting on incremental, synchronized denuclearization in which every action he takes must be met with a reciprocal step by the United States; in the past, the North has in fact managed to get the benefits without following through on its own pledges. Such skepticism is reinforced by Kim’s own domestic uncertainties. No matter how tame the North Korean military may have become under Kim’s ruthless rule, it might be difficult for the military to accept agreements on complete denuclearization. But neither Seoul nor Washington can accept the incremental approach; the entire deal would collapse if the North pursues it, leading to another round of crises and the possibility of military action and even all-out war on the Korean Peninsula. Seoul and Washington are aware of that risk and have sent a clear message to the North. And it is not likely that the North will return to this old practice, because its leader appears to fully understand that gains from denuclearization are hefty, whereas the nuclear path is excruciating.

By obtaining North Korea’s explicit commitment to “complete denuclearization” in the Panmunjom Declaration, South Korea laid the groundwork for the Trump-Kim meeting that is supposed to occur in late May. Now the ball is in Washington’s court. The Trump administration needs to deal with Kim to work out the details of denuclearization, which will require a compromise between Washington’s preferred comprehensive one-shot deal and Pyongyang’s incremental, synchronized approach. Trump will likely have to come up with a more realistic, flexible, and creative way of handling North Korea in order to move forward.

South Korea is not free from domestic constraints either. What will happen to U.S. forces in South Korea if a peace treaty is signed? It will be difficult to justify their continuing presence in South Korea after its adoption. But there will be strong conservative opposition to the reduction and withdrawal of U.S. forces, posing a major political dilemma for Moon. Although he wants to push for legislative approval of the declaration, in order to assure implementation even after a change in the government, conservative opposition is likely to block such approval, stalling implementation efforts.

“A peaceful, nuclear weapons–free Korean Peninsula” has been Moon’s goal since long before his election to the presidency. Although the Panmunjom summit has opened a new historical opportunity to fulfill his dream, shaping a new history of peace is not easy. But Moon is acutely aware of the obstacles on the path ahead. He will approach his long-standing goal with prudent and patient stewardship.

A Peace Treaty in Korea—and a Nobel Prize for Trump? Bruce Cumings on Korea’s past and future.

https://www.thenation.com/article/a-peace-treaty-in-korea-and-a-nobel-prize-for-trump/

A Peace Treaty in Korea—and a Nobel Prize for Trump?
Bruce Cumings on Korea’s past and future.
By Jon WienerTwitter

May 3, 2018, 12:30 PM

Historian Bruce Cumings is the author of many books, including The Korean War: A History and North Korea: Another Country. He writes for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and The Nation, and teaches at the University of Chicago. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Jon Wiener: North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said he would abandon his nuclear weapons if the United States agreed formally to end the Korean War and promise not to invade his country. Let’s start with a little history: why did North Korea develop nuclear weapons?

Bruce Cumings: The U.S. put hundreds of nuclear weapons into South Korea starting in 1958 with “Honest John” and “Matador” missiles, even nuclear land mines. Ever since then, the North Koreans have tried to come up with a deterrent. For decades, they built underground—about 15,000 facilities. Almost their entire military is underground in caves, in mountains. It was their only recourse since they didn’t have nuclear weapons. George H.W. Bush removed all battlefield nuclear weapons from around the world in 1991, including Korea, but every president since then has sent B-1 nuclear-capable bombers along the North Korean coast. Obama did it many times. Trump has done it. We also have Trident submarines in the area—they’re basically killing machines that could wipe out North Korea in a few hours with nuclear weapons. The North finally succeeded with a deterrent, exploding an atomic bomb in 2006, a very small one, and then last September they detonated what seems to have been a hydrogen bomb, much larger than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs.

JW: A little more history: why was there a war in Korea in the early fifties? What was the Korean War about?

BC: The Korean War is one of the most vexed in our history. If you look at high school and college textbooks, they say there was a war because Stalin in 1950 told Kim Il-sung to invade the South. But the war had origins going back into the 1930s, when Korea was a colony of Japan and Kim Il-sung and his friends fought the Japanese for a decade—as guerrillas in the most forbidding circumstances imaginable in Manchuria, where winter temperatures get down to 40 below zero. The Japanese, after their fashion, found Koreans to chase down Kim Il-sung. That set up a terrible nationalist dynamic in Korea after the Japanese left. Kim and his people set up the North Korean government in 1948, made up of former guerrillas and supported by the Soviets, and an American-supported South Korea was created with an entire army high command consisting of officers who fought with the Japanese. Americans never understood this dynamic. The Korean War was fundamentally a civil war, a war just waiting to happen because of this fratricidal colonial background, but because it came at the height of the Cold War, it generally was never seen—by most Americans—as a war similar to the Vietnam War. But it was a very similar war.

JW: What’s life like in the north for ordinary Koreans?

BC: It’s a lot better than it was 20 years ago when they had a famine caused by floods that destroyed about 40 percent of their arable land. Six or seven hundred thousand people died. Our papers always say it was two million, but careful demographic studies have shown that, while it was pretty awful, two million is wrong. The North Korean economy fundamentally collapsed in the 1990s. Their industries weren’t working. Their energy regime was gone. Then came the floods and the famine. Now, their economy is actually good by North Korean standards. It grew about 4 per cent last year. Kim Jong-un has tried to begin creating a middle class, at least in the urban areas, especially Pyongyang. They have many markets there now. People dress in a great variety of clothing, unlike the old proletarian garb. A lot of people have private cars now. I was supposed to go to Pyongyang last September for a visit. I haven’t been there for many years, but I was prevented by President Trump’s embargo of all American travel to North Korea. However, a friend of mine went last summer, and said he was just flabbergasted by the changes in Pyongyang: so much new building and new construction.

JW: It’s not just the Trump administration that’s deeply skeptical about North Korean promises. The mainstream media has been saying, “Don’t trust Kim Jong-un.” When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Seoul a year ago, he said, “North Korea has a history of violating one agreement after another, and it would be foolish to trust them now.” I wonder if you agree.

BC: No, I don’t. Our mainstream media, including The New York Times, gets this stuff wrong all the time. The first major agreement between the US and North Korea was made in 1994 under Bill Clinton. That agreement froze North Korea’s plutonium production—all of it, for eight years, under UN inspection. The whole facility was sealed, with closed circuit cameras all over the place. As a result they had no plutonium until 2002. Also: under the prodding of Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean president who came in in 1998 and started the reconciliation with the North, the Clinton administration moved to buy out North Korea’s medium- and long-range missiles. The general who ran the conglomerate making those missiles came to the White House in October 2000, and Madeline Albright went to Pyongyang two weeks later to complete this missile deal. But everybody’s forgotten that, because the 2000 election ended up in the Supreme Court and five people decided George Bush would be president.

When Bush came in, he did everything he could to destroy our agreements with North Korea. John Bolton and Dick Cheney, in particular, were determined not to proceed with the missile deal and to kill the agreement that froze North Korea’s plutonium. The main reason they did this was not because North Korea was a threat to the United States, but rather because it was a useful foil for China, which Cheney and Bush and others saw as a looming threat; here was a great way to build up missile defense. And of course, Bush put them into the Axis of Evil. So I don’t blame the North Koreans for moving in the direction they did after 2002. It’s the same today: when North Korea explodes an atomic bomb or tests a missile, we put more anti-missile batteries into the Far East, which undermine China’s deterrent, and we try to weld together South Korea, Japan, and the US in a tight alliance against China.

JW: North Korea has said it will abandon its nuclear weapons in exchange for an agreement with the United States that we will not invade. That seems like a great idea, but how do we get from here to there?

BC: When the general who ran the North’s missile conglomerate came to Washington in 2000, he signed an agreement with President Clinton that neither North Korea nor the United States would have hostile intent toward the other. This diplomatic agreement is very much like what North Korea appears to want again in 2018. However the Bush people acted as if it had never been signed, never even been written. I’m not, of course, suggesting that North Korea is faultless in all this. Quite the contrary. But the fact is that we already signed an agreement saying that we would not have hostile intent toward North Korea, which implies we’re not going to invade it or try to overthrow the regime.

I’m skeptical now about what kind of an agreement we could make with North Korea that would convince them that we’re sincere about it this time. I imagine it would have to come in the context of diplomatic relations finally being opened between Pyongyang and Washington, and guarantees both by South Korea and the US that they would not attempt regime change, or invade the north.

JW: How much can be accomplished by South Korea working with North Korea, and how much has to be the work of the United States, and China?

BC: The South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, has A long-term plan for relations with North Korea. He wants to reconcile with it, not necessarily unify with it, but to proceed with reconciliation, and rebuild the North Korean economy road by road, bridge by bridge, business by business. That’s really what’s behind this and it’s what’s attracting Kim Jong-un.

China has to be a part of ending the war in Korea and getting a peace agreement, since it signed the armistice agreement and South Korea didn’t. There are only three signatories, China, the US and North Korea. But I think that a real tension exists, more hidden now than open, between Seoul and Washington. Moon Jae-in is committed to moving forward quickly to reconcile with North Korea and help rebuild their economy and get rid of their nukes. But the foreign policy establishment in Washington mostly agrees with John Bolton, who said that South Korea is like putty in the hands of the North Koreans. A former high official in the Obama State Department said they’re running off the cliff like lemmings. I think that attitude is going to become prominent—unless Donald Trump somehow turns into a big supporter of President Moon.

JW: Last question: If we get a treaty ending the Korean War, would you support the proposal to give Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize?

BC: No. I think it would be much better to give the Peace Prize to President Moon and Chairman Kim. The North and South Koreans are doing much more to move this peace process forward than Trump is. Just a few months ago he was screaming that he was going to totally destroy North Korea. I don’t think Trump has the slightest idea of the nature of the Korean conflict, how deep it has run, or how long it has been going on. I’ll just say this: If he gets the Nobel Peace Prize, let’s hope it’s not like Henry Kissinger’s Nobel for achieving “peace” in Vietnam.