Further south in the countryside is Yulchon Station (1930) in Yeosu, South Jeolla, which was built during the Japanese colonial period and is a wooden facility typical of those commonly found in the Japanese countryside.
During an interim study on the project, researchers faced complaints that the government was trying to preserve a “leftover from the Japanese colonial era” but they decided the facility had value culturally and from a architectural perspective, so it was included on the list.
He came to Korea in 1957. The Priest from Ireland came to Korea the year following his ordanination as a priest assigned to the Saint Columbanus Church. Starting his post as the head priest at Gwangju Cathedral in 1969 he realised the condition of the mentally handicapped people housed in the Mudeung Rehabilitation Centre with unfavorable facilities and made a new resolution. He was especially sad about the death of a mentally handicapped young girl in 1979. “As soon as the girl with the name Yoa died from acute pneumonia instead of the funeral expenses the hospital demanded the body for dissection.”
Accordingly the Priest rejected this in one line “as she lived she couldn’t receive humane treatment and even though she has died you can’t do this.” Despite this after she was buried in the Yangsan Church Cemetary he said to the grave “Are you going to forgive me? Are you going to forgive society? For a long time he impressed on himself the words “I disregarded you” and repented through tears. The priest still tidies up Yoa’s grave with his own hands.
In October of 1950, at Pyongyang, when the fall of that city appeared imminent, the Communists loaded approximately 180 American war prisoners into open railroad cars for transport northward. These men were survivors of the Seoul-Pyongyang death march and were weak from lack of food, water, and medical care. They rode unprotected in the raw climate for 4 or 5 days, arriving at the Sunchon tunnel on October 30, 1950. Late in the afternoon, the prisoners were taken from the railroad cars in alternate groups of approximately 40 to nearby ravines, ostensibly to receive their first food in several days. There they were ruthlessly shot by North Korean soldiers, using Russian burp guns. One hundred and thirty-eight American soldiers lost their lives in this atrocity; 68 were murdered at the tunnel, 7 died of malnutrition while in the tunnel, and the remainder died of pneumonia, dysentery, and malnutrition while in the tunnel, and the remainder died of pneumonia, dysentery, and malnutrition on the horror trip from Pyongyang.
"I cannot deny that the prisoner camp conditions were deplorable," said Lee. Food, medicine, and clothes were not properly provided, and many forced laborers lost their lives due to wounds and diseases that went untreated. In the month of March 1943 alone, a full quarter of the 800 Australian prisoners were hospitalized. One hundred died. For good reason, the Australian military prosecutors could not forgive the Japanese for putting their men through hell on Earth. They were eager to pursue those responsible for the deaths of their comrades, but in their fury were not about to lend an ear to the plight of a youth caught up in the gears of the imperial war machine.
Lee served as a supervisor of the prisoners at Hintok. As a civilian hired by the Japanese military, he was lower down on the chain of command than a private.
However in the trial proceedings, he had somehow been transformed into the "Camp Commandant." The reason for this was that the military prosecutors took the testimony of the prisoners at their word, without an objective investigation into the situation. Most of the Australian prisoners did not know Lee’s Japanese name. Instead, they gave the various guards nicknames, which in the case of Lee was "lizard." The origin of this name is unknown.
According to testimonies of prisoners at the time, Lee was often at odds with the Australian army surgeon and Lieutenant Colonel E. E. Dunlop as he tried to meet the demands of the Japanese engineer corps to deploy laborers. Dunlop insisted that wounded soldiers not be used. The prisoners soon developed an animosity toward those Koreans directly overseeing them. Soldier Austin Pipe recounted that "lizard" was responsible for sending prisoners to work on the railroad, and others recalled that Lee had assaulted Dunlop. But other prisoners testified that Lee was among the gentler of the guards and had not assaulted Dunlop. For example, Captain Richard Allen testified that he could not recall Dunlop ever having been attacked by Lee, and that Lee was less brutal than the other guards. However, the vast majority of the testimony was unfavorable toward Lee. In order to sort out the war criminals, Australian investigators took pictures of the prison guards and showed them to the POWs. Those suspected of war crimes were then arrested and put on trial. There were no cross-examinations. Lee admitted to slapping those who disobeyed the rules, but denied taking any other harsh measures. It was difficult to gauge just exactly how much authority was granted to the Korean youth.
Lee was 20 years old when he was put on trial, and fearful of what lay before him. He feigned ignorance before the judge, and damaged his trustworthiness by insisting that daily labor was limited to five-and-a-half hours. Though his lawyer insisted the charges be dismissed on account of his not being Japanese, the judge rejected this argument - also backed up by the testimony of a Japanese colonel named Ishi - that as a Korean civilian, Lee’s actions were merely the product of his Japanese superiors’wishes.
There were few who welcomed him upon his release. His homeland viewed him with suspicion as a pro-Japanese collaborator, and the Japanese ostracized him for his Korean ethnicity. Thus, his struggle continues to this day. "If only for the sake of my fallen comrades," he said, "I hope that our honor will be one day restored." Beneath the sunlit sky, his moderate Jeolla Province accent was as distinct as ever.
When Japan signed the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty, restoring its sovereignty, Koreans were stripped of the Japanese citizenship they had been forced to adopt during Japan's colonial rule."Japan forced Koreans to participate in the war (as Japanese) but then refused to pay us compensation because (we were suddenly no longer Japanese citizens). That's irrational," said Lee, who now runs a taxi company in Tokyo. "The government's attitude is unforgivable."
It’s interesting how articles of this sort always refer to Koreans having their citizenship “stripped” in 1952. Isn’t that a bit similar to, say, “After the War of Independence was won, General Washington and his troops were stripped of their British citizenship”? It definitely implies forceful removal, generally removal that goes against the wishes of the stripped person (this may not apply to pole dancers, however). Why do so few articles say “Koreans had their citizenship restored”? Am I paranoid to suspect that the wording is chosen to make Japan look bad? The article quoted here is a classic case: “stripped of the Japanese citizenship they had been forced to adopt” - can’t win.
One day last week, Radio Moscow announced that Russian troops had begun to pull out of North Korea. On the same day, a Communist-inspired revolt broke out in Korea's southern tip.Next is a report from November 8, 1948, filed by Carl Mydans, who was accompanying the government troops.
The Russian withdrawal in the north worried South Koreans more than did the vest-pocket southern uprising. The Russians were leaving behind them a firmly installed Communist regime with a well-trained army of 150,000. The departure of the Red army was intended to bring pressure on the U.S. to withdraw its troops, leaving a South Korean constabulary and militia totaling about 60,000 to face the far stronger northern force.
Dr. Syngman Rhee, President of the two-month-old South Korean Republic, was in Tokyo visiting Douglas MacArthur at the time. Said MacArthur: "I will defend Korea as I would my own country—just as I would California."
With MacArthur's words to encourage them, the South Korean army energetically set about crushing the revolt. It had begun one morning before dawn, when 40 Communist members of a brigade stationed in the far southern port of Yosu shot their officers and bullied their sleepy comrades into attacking the city police station. They took over all of Yosu, then headed north, picking up confused recruits along the way. By the time they reached Sunchon, a city of 75,000, their force had grown to
around 2,000.
Brigadier General Song Ho's loyal troops quickly drove the rebels out of Sunchon, and chased them back into the rough, hilly country to the south. It was hard to tell friend from foe. Both loyal and rebel troops wore U.S. uniforms and carried U.S. weapons. Loyal troops finally put on white armbands. Said young Lieut. Colonel Kang Yung Noon: "What sadness that we had to fire our first bullets against our own brothers."
At week's end government forces had retaken most of the territory won by the rebels; they expected to recover Yosu soon. Asked who was responsible for the revolt, President Rhee said: "We really do not know." Then he pointed a finger to the north and added: "But all of our troubles come from one source."
The pretty little valley of Sunchon ("Peaceful Heaven") rests neatly at the bottom of the rugged Chiri Mountains, twelve miles north of the port of Yosu. On the morning of Oct. 20, Sunchon's farmers were harvesting their rice, when they heard a siren and the rattle of small arms from the railroad station. They looked up to see 2,000 rebel soldiers and 400 civilians swarming off a train from Yosu.
The rebels approached Sunchon city peacefully; but as soon as they entered the city, police opened fire. Joined by a company of soldiers guarding the city bridge, the rebels fired back. After a short, sharp battle they were in full control. The hundred or so cops who surrendered were lined up against the wall of the police compound and riddled. Then the rebels, joined by part of the citizenry, paraded through the city under North Korea's Communist banner, singing "Ten thousand years to the North Korean People's Republic!"
Star-Spangled Shirt. When darkness came, Communist execution squads went from house to house, shooting "rightists" in their beds or marching them to collection points where they were mowed down. In 2-3-days, 500 civilians were slaughtered. U.S. Lieuts. Stewart M. Greenbaum and Gordon Mohr, Army observers in Sunchon, narrowly escaped death. The rebel sergeant assigned to kill them was an old friend, who had drunk beer with them in their billet many times. He took the two officers into a field, fired into the ground and then led them to the Presbyterian Mission of Dr. John Curtis Crane, who was barricaded in with his wife and four other missionaries.
From one of the doctor's shirts and a few colored rags the ladies made a 16-star, eleven-stripe U.S. flag and put it up. The rebels began pounding at the compound gate, yelling: "Let's kill the Americans!" Suddenly one shouted: "No, no, not them; they are my friends." It was the lieutenants' friend, the sergeant. The rebels went away.
For the first few hours the loyal troops who retook Sunchon were as savage as the Communists had been. On the big compound of the Sunchon Agricultural and Forestry School we found what was left of the entire population of Sunchon. Women with babies on their backs watched without expression as their husbands and sons were beaten with clubs, rifle butts and steel helmets. They saw 22 of them marched away to the primary school nearby, and heard the volley of rifles which killed them.
"Get the Americans Out." Two days later, entering Yosu, the town where the revolt began, the government troops were much better behaved. The Communists' occupation of Yosu revealed the pattern they would like to impose on all South Korea. After arrest and murder of police and loyal leaders, the rebels took over all communications, banks, schools and food distribution. They established a "People's Committee" as the new government. The "People's Committee" announced: "Our two-point program: 1) to oppose, to the death the killing of our brothers, and 2) to get the Americans out of here."
Though the recapture of Yosu has temporarily stalled the revolt, most of the rebel troops have, melted off into the countryside and mountains with their weapons. Yosu's fall was not the end of a war; it was only the beginning. The general civilian point of view was expressed by one woman we found squatting in a shack on the outskirts of Yosu just after the fight had gone by her door. When we asked her whom she was for she replied: "I'm for you. You are the strongest."
At the time of the Yosun Incident, the quell force, made up of police and defense guard troops, used the Suncheon Middle School of Farming and Forestry (the predecessor of the present Sunchon National University) as their camp and headquarter when they attacked the insurgent forces in downtown Suncheon on Oct. 22th. The nearby Suncheon Northern Elementary School was the site of questioning and executing of civilians who were suspected of taking sides with the insurgents. The victims were executed without trial on the levee of a rice paddy behind the school's auditorium.
The Yosun Incident broke out on Oct. 19, 1948, when the 14th Regiment of the National Defense Guard of South Korea refused to move to Jeju Island on a mission to put down an armed uprising protesting against the estasblishment of the government by South Korea alone. When about 2,000 soldiers marched into downtown Yeosu, the civilians,students and local leftists, who were suffering from economic distress after the establishment of the new government, joined the soldiers. The insurgent forces instantly occupied eastern areas of Jeonnam Province, i.e., Suncheon, Gwangyang, Gurye, Boseong, Goheung, and Gokseong. The government established the quell force headquarter in Gwangju and defeated the insurgent forces in Suncheon on Oct. 23 and in Yeosu on Oct. 27. During the search operation against the civilian collaborators, many innocent civilians were executed without trial. The number of victims of the Yosun Incident is estimated to be about 10,000 including policement, soldiers, and civilians, though the exact number is not known.I didn't change any errors in spelling, punctuation, grammar, or spacing, and I didn't alter any of the romanization.
The Yosun Incident served as a momentum for establishing 'anti-communism' as the national idiology for South Korea and fixation of the partition of the Korean peninsula.
Suncheon Station bore witness to the early stages of the Yosun Incident. The insurgent forces used Suncheon Station as a base to attack downtown Suncheon while they were extending their influence outside Yeosu. At 8:39 Oct. 20, 1948, abotu two thousands of the insurgent forces left Yosu by train and other vehicles, and arrived at Suncheon Station at around 09:30 without facing any resistance. Two companies of the 14th Regiment, which had been dispatched to Suncheon, joined the insurgent forces under the command of 1st Lt. Hong Soonsuk. The joint forces were able to easily break through the resistance of the police troops who were defending Gwangyang Saguri (a three forked road) and the bank of Dongchun Stream, and advanced toward downtown Suncheon. The current building of the Suncheon Station was rebuilt in October, 1960.The placard on the banks of Dongchun/Dongcheon is about 15 minutes away. From Suncheon Station, walk west toward the river. Follow the pedestrian on-ramp to your right and start walking north along the river. It is on the east side of the stream, along the walking path, tucked under Suncheon Bridge (순천교).
The Suncheon Bridge (Jangdaedari) and the bank of Dongchun Stream witnessed the first fierce combat between the police and the insurgent forces at the time of the Yosun Incident. On October 20th, the Suncheon police and right-wing youths from adjacent regions established a defensive line at Gwangyang Samguri, but failed to keep the insurgent forces from advancing to downtown Suncheon because the 4th Regiment, a support troop from Gwangju, joined the insurgents. During the combat, most of the policement escaped from the spot, some were killed, and only about 50 retreated to the Suncheon Police Station.
At the time of the Yosun Incident, the quell force, made up of police and defense guard troops, used the Suncheon Middle School of Farming and Forestry (the predecessor of the present Sunchon National University) as their camp andSuncheon Northern Elementary School (presently 전남순천북초등학교) is located about a half-kilometer south of Suncheon University.
headquarter when they attacked the insurgent forces in downtown Suncheon on Oct. 22th. The nearby Suncheon Northern Elementary School was the site of questioning and executing of civilians who were suspected of taking sides with the insurgents. The victims were executed without trial on the levee of a rice paddy behind the school's auditorium.
This part of the country has had a violent 20th century. Before the Korean War, thousasnds were killed in the Yosu-Sunchon Incident (여수사건) of 1948, which was a response to the Jeju Massacre some 7 months earlier (for which President Roh apologized in 2003) which claimed between 14,000 and 30,000 deceased or missing, according to "The National Committee for the Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju April 3 Incident." You can find placards around Suncheon that point out the sites of notable events during the rebellion (in front of Suncheon Station, for example, or behind the language center of Suncheon National University).Chung Nam Sook, 80, said that in December 1950, soldiers of South Korea's 11th Army Division stormed his village in Hampyong, in the southwest of the country, to hunt Communist guerrillas. North Korean collaborators had already fled, but the soldiers rounded up the remaining villagers in a field.
"They told us to light our cigarettes. Then they began shooting their rifles and machine guns," Chung said. "After a while, an officer called out, 'Any of you who are still alive can stand up and go home now.' Those who did were shot again."
Despite seven bullet wounds, Chung survived by pretending to be dead under the heap of bodies. In July, the truth commission called the killings at Hampyong a "crime against humanity" and told the government to apologize and build a monument for the victims.Both sides in the war were accused of killing large numbers of unarmed civilians and of using terror to force people into compliance as villages across the country fell and were retaken.
For instance, South Korean police officers disguised as a North Korean unit entered villages at Naju, near Hampyong, in July 1950, and when people welcomed them with Communist flags, killed 97, the commission said.
As their town changed hands between the rival armies, villagers who had lost family members were quick to settle scores. More than 50 years later, families still hold grudges.
I was thinking 36,000 dead, 92,000 wounded, 8,000 MIA and half a century of security guarantees backed up by US troops might be compensation enough. Apparently, I was wrong.Lest anyone forget, a month ago President Roh said that North Korea should not have to apologize for past transgressions. According to him (via Yonhap):
“There is a disparity between (the South) asking (the North) for an apology and inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation. I want to ask advocates of a North Korean apology if they are opposed to inter-Korean peace,” Roh was quoted by his spokesperson as saying in a meeting with foreign correspondents based in Seoul.Yet another Korean truth commission, we should remember, cleared 83 of 148 Koreans war criminals---as found by the Allies---of responsibility and wrong-doing for their actions in World War II. 37% of Allied POWs perished at the hands of their captors---among whom Koreans were especially notorious---yet that commission found that these men were victims themselves, "saddled," as the Marmot put it, "by the Japanese with responsibility for the abuse of Allied POWs, and hence had to suffer the “double pain” of forced mobilization AND becoming a war criminal." The links to the original Korea Herald article and Michael Breen's Korea Times rebuttal are broken, so instead I'll just quote what Oranckay had to say on it:
“North Korea’s apology (for past wrongdoings) is a difficult question. In case of the end of a war, the loser is supposed to atone for the war damage and be liable for making an apology. But North Korea did not lose the war. It is not legally realistic to demand the North’s apology,” said Roh.
What annoys me is that one hears sympathy for men who would be called collaborators if they had been working in prisons that held fellow Koreans during colonial rule. Their prisoners were (largely) white, however, so they are afforded as much understanding as possible. And they get to be called “victims.”These select few incidents reveal an inability for accurate self-reflection that you often find in matters of history. It's worth revisiting an October article by top Koreanist Dr. Andrei Lankov (via The Grand Narrative blog):
Every foreign resident of Korea is exposed to a number of habitual Korean statements, which reflect Korean ideas about themselves and their nation. Many of these beliefs are true, some are not so well founded, while others are strange — like, say, the well-known tendency of Koreans to boast that their country “has four distinct seasons” as if this is something unusual and unknown to most other countries of the globe.
One such oft-repeated statement is that Korea has always suffered invasions and wars. Koreans often say, “Our history has been tragic, for centuries we have been invaded by powerful enemies and suffered in their hands greatly.” Every visitor to Korea is bound to hear such a remark sooner or later, and most people tend to take it at face value. This statement might correctly describe Korean history of the last one hundred years, but it is hardly applicable to earlier eras.
But why did such a view develop? There might be few reasons, but I suspect that Korean intellectuals of the 1950s or 1960s were shocked by the turbulent natureWe also see this opportunistic attitude of Korean nationalists when it comes to the topic of Japanese collaborators (친일파) and comfort women, although a complete analysis of either issue is well beyond the means of this humble blogger. Suffice it to say, there is a lack of transparency when it comes to Korean history "as told by Koreans" that ranks it right up there with the best the Chinese and Japanese have to offer. I'm skeptical about the potential for any truth and/or reconciliation that may arise in the hearts of the majority of Koreans as a result of any of these committees.
of the last hundred years of Korea history (to be more precise, the period between 1865 and 1960). This came as a sharp contrast to the tranquility and predictability of earlier times. This shock made Koreans believe that their history has always been that difficult and hard. And, of course, Korean nationalists used these feelings for their own gains. But this is another story.
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