Three Months and Twenty-Two Days Before Pearl Harbor

1899. A twenty-four-year-old is sentenced to life imprisonment and locked up in Hanseong Prison.

The verdict itself records this — that there was no circumstance of guilt.

What he made inside that prison was —

an English-Korean dictionary.

August 15th, 1941. A small Christian publisher in New York registers a book for copyright.

The author is Syngman Rhee. The title — Japan Inside Out.

The book said one thing. Japan will attack the United States.

From that registration to Pearl Harbor is three months and twenty-two days.

And yet the man who wrote it — the United States would not recognize him for four more years.

In 1899, Syngman Rhee, twenty-four, was in prison.

This is how he was taken — his name came up in another prisoner's statement.

Kang's case was an alleged plot to overthrow the government with Pak Yong-hyo at its head.

In July 1899, the sentence comes down.

And yet in the same verdict, this line appears alongside it.

It records that nothing amounted to a crime, and sentences him to life all the same.

Look at what a man given life at twenty-four did inside that prison.

October 1902. He founds a school inside the prison, teaching the inmates scripture and hymns.

In January of the next year he opens a prison library.

From April 1903 to February 1904, he compiles a dictionary.

A New English-Korean Dictionary.

And in June 1904 he writes a manuscript — a work of political thought in pure Korean script, The Spirit of Independence.

In prison he turns to Christianity. These are his own words.

A prison school and a library, a dictionary, and a manuscript.

These five years made him.

The aim he set was one — that Koreans be not another's subjects, but masters of their own country.

August 1904. An edict comes down and the prison gates open. He walks out after five years.

The eye he gained in that prison becomes the measure by which he later reads the world.

In 1904, that winter, having left prison, he departs for the United States.

George Washington, Harvard, and Princeton.

In 1910 he takes a doctorate at Princeton.

The dissertation was titled "Neutrality as influenced by the United States."

How does a weak nation stand among strong ones — that was his scholarly subject.

The question he carried out of prison had become a dissertation.

And he stays on in Washington.

June 1941. The Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea appoints him its official representative to the United States.

Two months later, that man publishes a book.

The book's argument gathers into one. Japan will attack the United States, and it will not be long.

What he saw was not only military strength. It was the system.

Can a country that worships its emperor as a living god become a civilization the world can stand on together?

He judged that it could not.

So his anti-Japanese stance was not national sentiment. It was a judgment about a system.

If what he woke to in prison was American democracy, this book set down its opposite.

How did people respond at the time?

Four months after Pearl Harbor, an American church paper introduces the book like this.

Not when the book came out — only after Pearl Harbor.

The America of 1941 had no intention of entering a new war.

In a poll that April, one in five favored fighting Germany and Italy.

These are figures from four months before the book appeared. The air had not much changed by the end of summer.

And to America, Japan was not an enemy but a long-standing friend.

In the Taft-Katsura agreement of 1905, the United States effectively acquiesced in Japan's rule over Korea.

To readers in that country, a warning about Japan written by a Korean was an unfamiliar thing.

Some even said it was pushing for war.

The morning of December 7th, 1941. Pearl Harbor.

A book no one had read four months earlier began, from that day, to be read again.

Japan will attack the United States — the attack on Pearl Harbor proved the sentence he had written.

He did not name Pearl Harbor itself. He had the direction right, and that is all.

Here one received account begins to give way — that America installed him.

After the attack proved his book, how did the United States treat him?

Fifteen days after the attack, the State Department instructs its ambassador in China.

That is looking into a man, not recognizing him.

The following year the Department's conclusion reads as follows — it will recognize no Korean group.

It did not discover him. It kept him out for four years.

March 1945. He writes to San Francisco, asking for a Korean seat at the founding conference of the United Nations.

He is refused.

In April he writes again. Argentina is admitted, and Syria, and Lebanon — why not Korea?

In May he sends it to President Truman.

Three times in four months.

And on June 5th. The letter that went to the White House is referred to the State Department, and an answer comes back.

The addressee was Syngman Rhee himself.

A notice that he could not be considered a representative — sent to the very man who claimed to be one.

That same day there was another letter he had sent to the Department.

Of that one the record says only this — not acknowledged.

Two months before liberation, this was still the official position of the United States.

Two months later liberation came. Recognition never did.

That September the Department says it will not block his return. But it attached a condition.

Not as a representative but only in a private capacity — the same words as the letter in June.

What carried him back was not Washington but Tokyo.

Five in the afternoon, October 16th, he lands at Kimpo airfield. A return after thirty-three years.

The claim that America installed him has to be re-examined against this document and this journey home.

To the politicians of Washington he was always a difficult man.

Under Japanese rule, an anti-Japanese agitator pressing them to recognize an independent country;

after liberation, an anti-communist pressing America to defend the principles of democracy even at the risk of a world war.

Syngman Rhee's life was a life spent fighting totalitarianism that crushes individual freedom and dignity.

His fierce anti-Japanese and anti-communist convictions came from there.