About 200 people gathered at the edge of a snow-covered park in Midtown Manhattan on Friday to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the start of the Korean independence movement.
Waving South Korean flags and chanting “Manse!” (which roughly translates to “Long live Korean independence!”), the crowd celebrated the students and other protesters who fought to shake Korea of Japanese colonial rule a century ago.
In honor of those student demonstrators, particularly Yu Gwan-sun, who became the face of the fight for freedom, dozens of women donned replicas of the white-and-black uniforms once worn by Yu and her peers at the Ewha Haktang school for women in Seoul.
Ina Ko, 49, an architect from the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, was one of several Ewha Haktang alumnae in attendance at the event on Friday, which took place at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the United Nations. Ms. Ko, who graduated from the school in 1989, said she had been influenced by Yu’s legacy.
“I think unconsciously I learned the spirit of resistance, of working for something that is much larger than our individual life,” she said.
On March 1, 1919, Yu, then 16 years old, and four classmates joined others on the streets of Seoul in one of the earliest protests against Japanese colonial rule.
At the urging of the organizers of that protest, Yu and her Ewha Haktang peers joined a March 5 student demonstration, where they were briefly detained by the Japanese authorities. The colonial government then ordered all schools closed on March 10.
A few days later Yu smuggled a copy of the Korean Declaration of Independence to her hometown, Cheonan, about 50 miles from Seoul, and rallied residents in the surrounding villages to join the Samil (literally “three-one,” or March 1) Movement.
On April 1, 1919, 3,000 people, including Yu, gathered in Cheonan, where they were met with violence. The Japanese military police fired on the crowds, killing 19 people, including Yu’s parents. The authorities quashed the protests within weeks, but not before an estimated two million people participated in more than 1,500 independence marches, according to Djun Kil Kim, the author of “The History of Korea.”
Yu was eventually jailed, where she continued to protest Japanese rule and was beaten and tortured as a result. She died of her injuries on Sept. 28, 1920, at 17 years old.
On Friday, William Chung, an 18-year-old high school senior from Fort Lee, N.J., said he decided to attend the event in Manhattan because he believed it was important to learn about the history.
“I just feel almost guilty that I don’t know more about this,” said Mr. Chung, whose parents were born in South Korea. “I feel like it’s almost my responsibility and my duty to come out here and commemorate today.”
While Korea was not liberated until decades later, the March 1 Movement occupies a special place in South Korea for shaping a sense of unity and igniting the resistance. This week, Yu was awarded South Korea’s highest medal of honor, according to the news agency Yonhap.
Japan has long since apologized for its colonization of the Korean Peninsula, which it annexed in 1910, though deep resentments continue to disrupt relations between the two countries. Korea was liberated in 1945, when it was split into North and South Korea, which were occupied by the Soviet Union and the United States at the end of World War II.
In January, the New York State Legislature passed a resolution commemorating March 1, 2019, as the “Centennial of the March 1st Movement” and honoring Yu’s legacy “as one of the youngest female human rights movement leaders.”
A similar resolution was introduced this week in the United States House of Representatives.
Source : Nytimes
