The Records Yun Ch'i-ho Left, Part 1 — Two Sentences on the Same Page

Let me read you a single sentence.

It was written in 1890, in the diary of a young Korean studying in the American South.

More than a century ago, he named it exactly: a country built on freedom was handing that freedom out by skin color.

And yet, on the same day, on the same page, there is also this.

The eye that saw through discrimination, and the eye that inherited it whole.

Between those two sentences there is no distance — not a day, not a page.

His name was Yun Chi-ho.

Today we remember him in one way, mostly — as a collaborator with Japan.

That label is not wrong.

But the label alone does not explain why those two sentences came from the same hand on the same day.

So today we look at the years before that name was fastened to him.

We will follow only what Yun Chi-ho, in his twenties, wrote down in his own hand.

First, let me say what this episode rests on.

Yun Chi-ho kept a diary from 1883 to 1943 — sixty years.

He wrote first in classical Chinese, then in Korean.

Then in December 1889 he wrote this: from today, he had resolved to keep the diary in English.

And from that point on, the diary continues in English.

A Korean man, in Korea, keeping his diary in English.

The diary is now published by the National Institute of Korean History, original and Korean translation side by side.

The originals are held at Emory University in the United States.

Anyone can open them.

This matters because what we are about to see is not how others judged him, but what he saw and felt on a given day.

It was set down day by day, with no chance to explain himself and no chance to dress it up.

One thing I should say in advance.

There is a stretch of this diary that is missing.

I will come back to that later.

In December 1884, the Gapsin Coup breaks out.

Young reformers led by Kim Ok-gyun and Pak Yong-hyo seized power and lost it within three days.

Yun Chi-ho belonged to that camp.

And yet this is what he wrote in his diary at the time.

He was speaking of the men who led the coup — the reformers he himself was close to.

At around nineteen, he was already looking coldly at the people closest to him.

What defines this man is already visible here — he judged before he took sides.

And his judgments were, as a rule, harsh.

On others, and on his own country.

After the coup failed, Yun Chi-ho left Korea.

It was not study abroad. It was exile.

He had not taken part in the coup himself, but he was close to those who did, and that made him unsafe.

In January 1885 he crossed to Shanghai and studied three and a half years at the Anglo-Chinese College, then sailed for America in 1888 with the backing of Methodist missionaries.

He studied at Vanderbilt, then at Emory, until 1893.

Where he landed was the American South.

Some twenty years after the Civil War — slavery abolished by law, segregation fully intact.

In May 1890, this happened to him.

"Your town brethren" meant the Chinese men who did laundry in that town.

It meant: you do not belong where we are.

In the diary that day he added this.

That February he had been praised for an examination.

But the praise ran like this — that a Korean could produce such a paper was itself the answer to the question, "Is a heathen worth educating?"

Yun Chi-ho recorded that compliment in his diary as a remark made while looking down at him.

Even praise was handed to him from outside the fence of civilization.

And he recognized that structure on the spot.

On the first of November 1893, he looks back on it this way.

Meaning: in the American South, he was something to be stared at.

February 1892 records this as well.

Speaking about Korea before an American audience, he is asked this question.

Whether Koreans know why there is day and night.

Yun Chi-ho set down the question and his own answer side by side in the diary.

And his answer was this.

This is not a story of being beaten or driven out.

It is quieter than that, and it lasts longer — being seated, again and again, outside the fence of civilization.

While he was learning in America, he was also learning what he looked like to others.

And then, on the fourteenth of February 1890, comes the diary entry I read at the start.

He took the phrase from the American Declaration of Independence — the right that cannot be taken away — and wrote that in practice it was granted by skin color.

He saw exactly how far American freedom went, while living inside it.

And on that same day he writes this about Chinese immigrants in America.

A man standing on the receiving end of discrimination stands, on the same day, on the delivering end of it.

The way white Americans pushed Koreans outside civilization — that is exactly how he pushes the Chinese out.

Faced with this, we want to choose one of two things.

Quote only the first sentence and call him ahead of his time, or quote only the second and say this is what he was after all.

But the record does not ask us to choose.

The two sentences are on the same page.

The moment we pick one, we are no longer reading him. We are reading our own conclusion.

Two weeks after he wrote down that insult — on the eighteenth of May 1890 — he writes at length about Korea's future.

What he put first was the road of reforming itself.

Freedom of the press, and education.

What he had seen and learned in America is there, intact.

And then comes the very next sentence.

He wrote out the reforms himself, and underneath them wrote, in his own hand, why they were impossible.

What he named was not institutions but people — the Queen and those around her, and the men beside the King.

Then he lays out the alternatives.

Among them is this.

He is saying his own country would be better off ruled by another.

And he went as far as comparing which of the two would be better.

A student in his twenties, writing that in his diary.

Here is what must be seen precisely.

This is not a sentence praising colonial rule. It is a sentence that has entirely given up on his country reforming itself.

He laid out five roads and was choosing the least bad, and from that list the road where Korea does it on its own had already been erased.

In November 1893, we see where that despair goes.

Look again at the date on that sentence.

It is 1893.

Twelve years before the 1905 protectorate treaty. Seventeen years before annexation.

It is not that he came to feel this way because he later collaborated with Japan.

The order runs the other way.

And this sentence sits on the same day, in the same diary, as the recollection of being a spectacle in the American South.

Being treated as a man outside civilization, hatred toward his own country, and longing toward Japan are all there together on one page.

The place where he came to hate Korea and the place where he came to look up at Japan were not two different places.

In 1895, Yun Chi-ho returns to Korea. And in February of that year he writes this.

That February he writes this.

But that October, the point of his pen turns elsewhere.

When a move was made to depose the Queen, he presses this question.

This is the same man who two years earlier wrote, O blessed Japan, paradise of the East.

The same man, having seen what Japan actually did, writes this.

We are not leaving this passage out.

We read his longing for Japan earlier, so we must read this sentence here as well.

Otherwise we are not reading him. We are editing him.

That same month he also opposed the move to elevate Korea's king to emperor.

Raising the name, he argued, would not change how Korea was treated abroad, and would invite ridicule instead.

And in July 1898, he records the substance of a petition from the Independence Club.

The country had come to this pass, he writes, not only because of unworthy ministers.

A sentence aimed not at the ministers but at the sovereign.

His criticism had no sanctuary — not Japan, not the court, not the king.

Coldly assessed, those judgments were mostly not wrong.

And that is precisely this man's difficulty — his diagnoses were often right, and those diagnoses carried him further and further from his own country.

Seeing his country clearly and loving his country did not travel together in this man.

And then the diary stops.

The surviving diary breaks off on the third of July 1906 and begins again on the first of January 1916.

This is true not only of the edition published by the National Institute of Korean History — the list of originals held at Emory has the same gap.

Whether he did not write, or wrote and had it seized or lost — we cannot know.

No source explains the reason.

In the record of a man who kept a diary for some twenty years, those particular ten years are missing.

And those ten years are the decisive stretch of his life.

Here is what happened inside that gap.

In 1911, the Japanese authorities arrested hundreds of people, claiming a plot to assassinate the Governor-General.

It later came to be called the Case of the 105.

The Japanese authorities named Yun Chi-ho the principal figure in it.

September 1912, ten years' imprisonment at first instance.

October 1913, six years confirmed at the final instance.

According to contemporary trial reports and the commentary of the National Institute of Korean History, he confessed to the plot under severe torture and then firmly retracted that confession in court.

The Japanese authorities denied the torture.

In February 1915 he is released under a special pardon.

The sentence was six years, but the time actually served was about three.

A man who had criticized his own country so harshly was arrested on a charge of plotting to kill the Governor-General.

And as I said earlier, contemporary trial reports and the commentary of the National Institute of Korean History record that he was tortured.

The Japanese authorities denied it.

What he thought during those three years, we have no way of knowing.

Because the diary he wrote in that period does not survive.

We are not going to fill in a place where the record is absent.

Only this is certain — between the Yun Chi-ho who went into prison and the one who came out, there is no record left in his own hand.

This episode stops here.

February 1915 — the point at which he walked out of the prison gate.

No one watching is unaware of what came next.

The name we call him by today is already settled.

But how that name came to be fastened to him is not what we are covering today.

The record we would need to read that stretch is not yet ready.

As I said, the diary breaks off in July 1906 and resumes in January 1916.

So to take up the Yun Chi-ho who comes after, we would have to read a different body of record from the beginning — different from everything we read today.

That is not something to load onto a single episode.

What this episode followed is exactly this far — what one clear-eyed young man saw, what he inherited, and where he gave up on his own country.

In this episode we did not defend Yun Chi-ho.

Nor did we denounce him.

We simply read the sentences he left, without picking among them.

That he saw through American racism is a fact, and that on the same day he called Chinese people offscouring is also a fact.

That he diagnosed his country's illness precisely is a fact, and that at the end of that diagnosis he wrote another nation's rule would be better is also a fact.

And that the Japanese authorities named him the principal figure in an assassination plot and held him for three years is also a fact.

These sentences do not cancel one another.

When we try to cover one with the other, we stop reading a person and start reading a conclusion.

Why did a young man that clear-sighted end up where he did?

Today we have followed him half of the way.

As far as this — that the seed was already fully present in the diary of a man in his twenties, confirmed by the record he wrote himself.

The other half — the Yun Chi-ho after he left prison — we will read separately, in the diary that resumes in 1916.

Nothing you heard today was invented.

The originals are published, as they are, in the database of the National Institute of Korean History.

Anyone can open them, right now, for themselves.