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.
