HISTORY: Independence Movement Day

I don't write about Korea very much, but since today is a national holiday (Independence Movement Day), I thought it was time to break the trend.

Japan controlled Korea from 1910 until the end of WWII in 1945. Those were 35 brutal years. Koreans were forced to "become" Japanese. They were given Japanese names, made to learn Japanese, and worked like slaves for the foreign rulers. Also, thousands of women were forced to become sex slaves for the Japanese army.

On March 1, 1919 (kind of, it was actually the lunar calendar), a Korean uprising against Japanese colonisation erupted.

Last year we went with a Korean friend to a prison that the Japanese used to store Korean protestors. The accounts of abuse and torture won't be recounted here today.

From a Korean history website:

The 33 organizers of the movement were mostly Christian idealists and had no experience in mass movement and so the March failed disastrously.

The Japanese suppressed the movement with brutal force. They fired into groups of Korean Christians singing hymns. Christian leaders were nailed to wooden crosses and were left to die a slow death – “so that they can go to heaven”. Mounted police beheaded young school children. The police burned down churches. The official Japanese count of casualties include 553 killed, 1,409 injured, and 12,522 arrested, but the Korean estimates are much higher, over 7,500 killed, about 15,000 injured, and 45,000 arrested.


If you're interested, you can learn more about it here:

Hankook
Wikipedia


Packing history can sometimes be heavier than expected.