March 1st

“Today marks the declaration of Korean independence. There will be peaceful demonstrations all over Korea. If our meetings are orderly and peaceful, we shall receive the help of President Wilson and the great powers at Versailles, and Korea will be a free nation.”

On this day in 1919, at 2:00 p.m., Korean Nationalists involved with what would come to be known as the Samil Movement read the Korean Declaration of Independence to crowds throughout the country.

The Declaration was written by the historian Choe Nam-seon and the poet Manhae and propagated by a core group of 33, mostly Christian and student, activists. Although the core group of activists, concerned about lage demonsrations, met initially in the Taehwagwan restaurant in Seoul, public demonstrations around Korea attracted up to a total of two million people.

The core activists sent the Declaration of Independence to the Japanese Governor General Count Yoshimichi Hasegawa, then turned themselves in to police. As the demonstrations grew and the Japanese military police found it increasingly difficult to control the crowd, they resorted to intimidation and violence. Thousands of demonstrators were arrested and many were killed. Reports of beatings, beheadings, stabbings, and even crucifixions abounded and were documented by American missionaries teaching in Korea. The violence continued for at least a month and half as Japanese police searched houses, churches, and other buildings throughout the country looking for protest organizers.

Possibly the most notorious crackdown occurred in Jeam-ri, Gyonggi province, where in retaliation for the destruction of Japanese buildings and the killings of their colleagues, Japanese police officers forced 30 men into a church, barred the doors, shot the men through the windows, then razed the building, killing all but one.

In the process of the protests, legends were born, most notably Yu Kwan-soon, referred to in some patriotic literature as “Korea’s Jean d’Arc”, who was arrested while a teenaged student and supposedly held, by some accounts in a one meter cube, and tortured for 20 months at Seodaemun Hyeongmuso - being frozen, then revived through a process of dousing her with cold water before placing her outside or violating her with a hose that pumped cold water into her, then placing her next to a heater. The legendary girl is said to have forcefully fought her tormentors until her death in October 1920.

By Japanese accounts, 553 were killed, 1,409 injured, and 12,522 arrested, along with eight policemen killed and 158 wounded, but by commonly cited Korean accounts, 7,509 were killed, 15,849 wounded, and 46,303 arrested.

Why March 1, 1919?

March 1, 1919 happened to fall at the intersection of two events of sufficient moment to push a restive Korean populace, chafing under the yoke of a highly restrictive, often brutal colonization, into open, albeit restrained and peaceful, revolt.

First, King Gojong, Korea’s first Emperor, died in the Deoksugung, the palace compound to which he had been confined since his forced abdication in 1907 following embarrassing comments made by a member of his legation to the Hague Convention, who were refused entry under pressure from the Japanese, but issued a warning to the US and UK:

“The United States does not realize what Japan’s policy in the Far East is and what it portends for the American people. The Japanese adopted a policy that in the end will give her complete control over commerce and industry in the Far East. Japan is bitter against the United States and against Great Britain. If the United States does not watch Japan closely she will force the Americans and the English out of the Far East.”

Upset by these remarks, the Emperor Meiji forced Gojong to abdicate in favor of his son. A little over 11 years later, Gojong died and widespread belief in Korea was that their King, who had declared Korea an Empire in order to remove the burden of tribute to China, had been poisoned by the Japanese guards at he Deoksugung.

Of equal, if not greater import, was US President Woodrow Wilson, who had issued his Fourteen Points to the US Congress in January 1918, then reiterated them at the Paris Peace Conference to end the First World War a year later. The Fourteen Points formed the basis of the Treaty of Versailles. Of particular interest to Korean students in Tokyo at the time were the fifth and fourteenth points, which were:

5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.

and

14. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

Surely, they thought, this would spell the end of Korea’s oppression by Japan. The end of World War I and the new world order that was to follow would free Korea from the humiliation it had suffered since 1905.

But it was not to be, unbeknownst to the naive students and Christians who led the demonstrations, the right to sovereignty did not apply to the colonies of the victorious Triple Entente and its allies, including Japan. No luck for India, Indochina, most of the Middle East and Maghreb, and, of course, Korea.

The Aftermath

Count Hasegawa resigned his post as Governor General of Korea to take responsibility for the unrest surrounding the March 1st Movement and was replaced by Viscount Makoto Saito, who later became Japan’s 30th Prime Minister.

Japan relented a bit and granted Korea a few concessions, namely replacing the military police force with a civilian one and allowing a limited amount of press freedom. The relatively relaxed atmosphere of the 1920s led to some of the developments that could be considered the meager silver lining of Japan’s colonization of Korea - mostly infrastructure improvements and the introduction of new technologies. This period was short-lived, though, as Japan clamped down again following the outbreak of hostilities in China in 1931.

In May 1949, March 1st was made a national holiday in Korea, where it is commemorated to this day and provides yet one more focus for North Korea’s wacky brand of historical revisionism and gives South Korean newspaper editors something to write about.

Here’s the text:

Samil Proclamation of Korean Independence

We herewith proclaim the independence of Korea and the liberty of the Korean people. We tell it to the world in witness of the equality of all nations and we pass it on to our posterity as their inherent right.

We herewith proclaim the independence of Korea and the liberty of the Korean people. We tell it to the world in witness of the equality of all nations and we pass it on to our posterity as their inherent right. We make this proclamation, having in back of us 5,000 years of history, and 20,000,000 united loyal people. We take this step to insure to our children, for all time to come, personal liberty in accord with the awakening consciousness of this new era. This is the clear leading of God, the moving principle of the present age, the whole human race’s just claim. It is something that cannot be stamped out, or stifled, or gagged, or suppressed by any means.

Victims of an older age, when brute force and the spirit of plunder ruled, we have come after these long thousands of years to experience the agony of ten years of foreign oppression, with every loss to the right to live, every restriction of the freedom of thought, every damage done to the dignity of life, every opportunity lost for a share in the intelligent advance of the age in which we live.

Assumedly, if the defects of the past are to be rectified, if the agony of the present is to be unloosed, if the future oppression is to be avoided, if thought is to be set free, if right of action is to be given a place, if we are to attain to any way of progress, if we are to deliver our children from the painful, shameful heritage, if we are to leave blessing and happiness intact for those who succeed us, the first of all necessary things is the clear-cut independence of our people. What cannot our twenty millions do, every man with sword in heart, in this day when human nature and conscience are making a stand for truth and right?

What barrier can we not break, what purpose can we not a accomplish?

We have no desire to accuse Japan of breaking many solemn treaties since 1836, nor to single out specially the teachers in the schools or government officials who treat the heritage of our ancestors as a colony of their own, and our people and their civilization as a nation of savages, finding delight only in beating us down and bringing us under their heel.

We have no wish to find special fault with Japan’s lack of fairness or her contempt of our civilization and the principles on which her state rests; we, who have greater cause to reprimand ourselves, need not spend precious time in finding fault with others; neither need we, who require so urgently to build for the future, spend useless hours over what is past and gone. Our urgent need today is the settling up of this house or ours and not a discussion of who has broken it down, or what has caused its ruin. Our work is to clear the future of defeats in accord with the earnest dictates of conscience. Let us not be filled with bitterness or resentment over past agonies or past occasions for anger.

Our part is to influence the Japanese government, dominated as it is by the old idea of brute force which thinks to run counter to common and universal law, so that it will change, act honestly and in accord with the principles of right and truth. The result of annexation, brought about without any conference with the Korean people, is that the Japanese, indifferent to us, use every kind of partiality for their own, and by a false set of figures show a profit and loss account between us two peoples most untrue, digging a trench of everlasting resentment deeper and deeper the farther they go.

Ought not the way of enlightened courage to be to correct the evils of the past by ways that are sincere, and by true sympathy and friendly feeling make a new world in which the two peoples will be equally blessed?

To bind by force twenty millions of resentful Koreans will mean not only loss of pence forever for this part of the Far East, but also will increase the ever-growing suspicion of four hundred millions of Chinese-upon whom depends the danger or safety of the Far East-besides strengthening the hatred of Japan. From this all the rest of the East will suffer. Today Korean independence will mean not only daily life and happiness for us, but also it would mean Japan’s departure from an evil way and exaltation to the place of true protector of the East, so that China, too, even in her dreams, would put all fear of Japan aside.

This thought comes from no minor resentment, but from a large hope for the future welfare and blessing of mankind.
A new era wakes before our eyes, the old world of force is gone, and the new world of righteousness and truth is here. Out of the experience and travail of the old world arises this light on life’s affairs. The insects stifled by the foe and snow of winter awake at this same time with the breezes of spring and the soft light of the sun upon them.

It is the day of the restoration of all things on the full tide of which we set forth, without delay or fear. We desire a full measure of satisfaction in the way of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and an opportunity to develop what is in use for the glory of our people.

We awake now from the aid world with its darkened conditions in full determination and one heart and one mind, with right on our side, along with the forces of nature, to a new life. May all the ancestors to the thousands and ten thousand generations old us from within and all the force of the world aid us from without, and let the day we take hold be the day of our attainment. In this hope we go forward.

THREE ITEMS OF AGREEMENT

1. This work of ours is in behalf of truth, religion and life undertaken at the request of our people, in order to make known their desire for liberty. Let no violence be done to anyone.
2. Let those who follow us every man all the time, every hour, show forth with gladness this same mind.
3. Let all things be done decently and in order, so that our behavior to the very end may be honorable and upright.

The 4252nd year of the Kingdom of Korea, 3rd Month

Representatives of the People

The signatures attached to the document are:

Son Byung Hi, Kil Sun Chu, Yi Pil Chu, Paik Long Sung, Kim Won
Kyu, Kim Byung Cho, Kim Chang Choon, Kwon Dong Chin, Kwon
Byung Duk, Na Long Whan, Na In Hup, Yang Chun Paik, Yang Han
Mook, Lee Yer Dai, Yi Kap Sung, Yi Mung Yong, Yi Seung Hoon, Yi
Chong Hoon, Yi Chong Il, Lim Yei Whan, Pak Choon Seung, Pak Hi Do,
Pak Tong Wan, Sin Hong Sik, Sin Suk Ku, Oh Sei Chang, Oh Wha
Young, Chung Choon Su, Choi Sung Mo, Choi Ju, Yong Woon, Hong
Byung Ki, Hong Ki Cho.