8 May 1919 – Jail Korean Agitators

Thirty-eight Korean agitators at Pyongyang have been sentenced to prison for periods ranging from six months to two years…  About 2,400 agitators arrested at Seoul and its suburbs have been released by the police after admonition.  A great many public market places in the country have been closed because it was found that disturbances arose on market days.

11 May 1919 – Causes of the Korean Uprising

Long “analysis” article from a professor at Yale.  It is well worth reading in total, and I’ll just quote from the beginning to wet the appetite:

But in none of the other cases [of peoples struggling against colonial rule] is the political ignorance quite so dense, or the long-continued submission to a Government intrinsically corrupt and disregardful of all the interests of its own subjects, and so really dominated by the lowest foreign influences (emanating from that inexhaustible fountain of political corruption, China,) as had been the case in Korea for 500 years prior to its occupation by the Japanese Protectorate under Prince Ito.

And yet the Korean patriots are boasting the departed glories of their past “freedom,” and, like all the others likewise affected, are calling loudly for the application of them of more or less of the “Fourteen Points” of President Wilson.

If I had continued on in my college work, I planned to focus on the issue of Chinese influence on Korea in the Chosun Dynasty.  What this author just said has been echoed by some in Korea going back to the end of the 19th Century, but I have my doubts, and the second paragraph above hits directly on my core doubt:  

What I doubt is that China’s historical relationship can be placed in the same category as Japan’s 20th Century colonization.   There is no doubt Korean society incorporated many of what I call “technologies” it took from Chinese civilization – like the structure of the Korean government or Buddhism or Confucianism and so on…

…but that doesn’t mean China “controlled” Korea.   I don’t think you can support that claim through the vast majority of Korean history.

That doesn’t mean the Korean peasants weren’t downtrodden or that the power of the elites and government over them was not based on thought-systems taken from China.  It simply means Peking wasn’t controlling Korea from afar.

  One cause of the present, and of all previous demonstrations, is the propagandism of a certain secret society in foreign lands, (“patriots” in their own eyes, but “dangerous conspirators” in the eyes of the Japanese Government,) who procured the assassination of Prince Ito, of our countrymen, Durham White Stevens, and of  some of their most influential countrymen, supposed to be too friendly to the Japanese… 

12 May 1919 – Korea Asks Big Four For Full Sovereignty

A petition from the Korean people asking for liberation from Japan was submitted to the Peace Conference [in Paris] today by representatives of Korea. 

Article continues but changes the dateline from Paris to Washington:

Recognition by the Peace Conference of Korea’s claim to independence was urged by Dr. Syngman Rhee, Secretary of State of the Provisional Korean Government, in a message sent to President Wilson and Premier Clemenceau…

“The Korean people have solemnly sworn to resist all existing authorities in Korea other than those of their own Provisional Government.  The only way the Korean people can be compelled to submit to the illegal, immoral, and self-appointed authorities is by using brutal force.  I regret to state to you that brutal force is now promiscuously used to suppress the independence movement of the Korean people.”

A treaty signed on Aug. 23, 1910, by Japan and Korea formally annexed the Korean territory to the Empire of Japan.  The Korean Imperial Government was overthrown in 1905.  The treaty of 1910 deprived the Korean Emperor of all political power, changed the name of the country to Choson, and established the office of the Japanese Governor General.  From the date of the treaty Korea became an integral part of the Japanese Empire.

16 May 1919 – To Revise Korean System

The Privy Council [of Japan] met today under the Presidency of the Emperor and decided upon a partial revision of the organic system of the Korean government.

Privy Council plans…are understood to contemplate, if not a complete substitution of civil for military control, at least a great enlargement of the participation of civilians in the administration.

It was said in Japanese quarters today that the purpose of the Japanese Government to afford the Koreans a large measure of self-government was suspended in execution only by reason of the recent independence movement, and that with the restoration of quiet the present military administration in Korea would give way to civil control.

21 May 1919 – Korean Independence – Letter to the Editor

The article is a direct attack on the 11 May analysis offered by the Yale professor which I linked above.

It is a curious fact that a man living in America should claim to know more about the causes of the Korean revolution than do the Koreans themselves or the Westerners who have witnessed the bloody scenes with their own eyes.

Smack – Smack – both cheeks…

Professor Ladd may be as pro-Japanese as he wishes to be:  that is his privilege.  But the thing I object to is his misstatement of facts.

The author goes on to claim that he is very close to the Korean leaders of the movement – which makes this letter worth reading in full…

Here is a further taste:

…two American women missionaries, Mrs. Moore and Miss Trissel, were beaten by Japanese soldiers; that the homes of some of the missionaries were searched by the Japanese; that the Korean patients in the American hospital in Seoul were dragged out by the Japanese police to have tortures inflicted upon them; that a Korean school girl had both her hands cut off by a Japanese soldier for no greater crime than merely holding a copy of the independence manifesto…

25 May 1919 – The Korean Revolt

Professor Ladd wasn’t the type to take a smack down without rebuttal and fired back a letter of his own. 

He starts by saying normally he doesn’t get involved in newspaper mudslingings and just waits for events to prove themselves — but – the reason he gives for replying to critics this time is rather interesting:

But the relations between the US and Japan are at present so delicate, and the efforts to embitter them from several quarters so persistent, that I think some reply to the letters of my Korean friends, Mr. Rhee and Mr. Chung, demands at least a brief notice.

Fascinating.

His motivation is protection of a positive relationship between Japan and the US which he says is at a critical juncture in 1919…

Mr. Chung denies that any organizations outside or inside of Korea have had to do with exciting the attempt at revolution…

Uh…???…

I’ll have to go back and read the last post quoted, because I don’t remember it claiming that.

It would also be simply ludicrous to say no group “outside or inside” was involved in organizing the movement.   And I don’t think that was what was actually claimed. 

Prof. Ladd just lost a lot of points on my scorecard with that one…

As to the activities of the Korean League for the Independence of Korea, in this and other foreign lands, that they are all honorable and aboveboard, not to say truthful and wise, would be quite too much for any patriot to claim.

Smack!!  — but what does he mean by “any patriot”?  A patriot of where?

Whatever may be true of the branch to which my critics confess adherence, the same thing cannot be said of “The Korean Students’ League of America…” from which emanate misspelled and ungrammatical but insulting and threatening letters.  I have myself received one…

Why does this remind me of expat go-arounds at Dave’s ESL Cafe???

Ladd looses a few more points here for bitching about “misspellings and ungrammatical letters.”  

It isn’t their native language, jerk.

I have never spoken in approbation of the Government just preceding the rebellion, or of the Japanese soldiers in their method of suppressing it.  But the acts of outrageous cruelty were not on one side only.  And when unscrupulous scoundrels, of whom there is  fair share in Korea, mix with thousands of innocent but deluded people, who believe that President Wilson has arrived to deliver them so that they may again open their shops and send their children to school, or that, if they collect at a certain spot and banzai a few times, they will receive thirty sen each for their pains, and then are led on to assail the police station, or stone the workmen at their work, some one is sure to get hurt even by soldiers much less excitable and much more human than are the Japanese soldiery.

4 thoughts here:

1.  I don’t mean this as any type of validation of any idea related to these two movements, but we could have a conversation along these lines about the Kwangju Massacre too.  In fact, the K-blogs do occasionally have such a debate when the anniversary of that rolls around.

2.  This highlights yet again the influence Pres. Wilson and the mood of the day in Western Europe at the end of WWI had so far away in  Korea.

3.  Which reminds me of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the  lead up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

4.  The last part makes me think of how I’ve thought about the Boston Massacre going back to when I was just a little kid in elementary school.

(By the way, the film footage of the Tiananmen Tank Man for me highlights one of the greatest moments in democracy and freedom ever..

…as does the knowledge that future US President John Adams was the defense attorney at the trial of the British soldiers involved in the Boston “Massacre”.)

Some of the tales of atrocities are true; some are gross exaggerations; some are pure falsehoods.