The Records Yun Ch'i-ho Left, Part 2 — Tears and Cynicism

Let me show you a single sentence.

It's a diary entry written by a window of an office in Jongno, Seoul, on March 1, 1919.

At the very moment the March 1st Movement broke out, he wept at the sight of students running past his window.

But on the same day, on the same page, there is also this sentence.

Tears and cynicism sit in the same person, on the same day, on the same page.

In Part 1, we saw a scene like this once before.

It was the page where, as a student in America, he saw through racial discrimination while at the same time despising Chinese immigrants.

That habit never went away.

Part 1 ended in February 1915, at the moment he walked out of prison.

Today begins on the next page.

His diary, which broke off in July 1906, resumes on January 1, 1916.

This gap includes the roughly three years he spent imprisoned over the Case of the 105, which we covered in Part 1.

After ten years, this is the first line he wrote.

The first thing this man wrote after picking up his pen again after ten years was a record of paying New Year's calls on senior officials of the Government-General of Korea.

This single line alone cannot confirm a shift in his political stance.

But we will leave this as a fact: the moment his diary resumes, he was already sitting in the Government-General's reception room.

What he thought while imprisoned, we cannot know, since no diary from that period survives.

And this New Year's courtesy call was not a one-time thing.

On January 1, 1921, even after the March 1st Movement had passed, he again left his card at Governor-General Saito's residence.

This pattern of paying New Year's calls on senior Government-General officials after his release from prison recurs throughout the diaries of the following years.

It's February 27, 1919 — two days before the March 1st Movement broke out.

On a day when people flocked from across the country to see Emperor Gojong's funeral procession, he writes this.

With this sentence, he himself refutes the common notion that Koreans have no national consciousness.

But the very next sentence reads like this.

He admits that national consciousness exists.

But the solution he offers is not independence — it is appeasement.

The eye that reads the Korean mind, and the attitude that seeks its answer anywhere but independence, sit within the same paragraph.

That same afternoon, he convened a staff meeting of the Korean YMCA and decided to suspend all public meetings in the building for three days starting the following Sunday.

He had already sensed that something unusual was approaching.

Two days later, March 1 arrives.

Let me show you a little more of what comes before and after the diary entry I read at the start of this video.

At 10 a.m., he is told that something is going to happen today.

A little after 1 p.m., detectives storm the YMCA building and search every room and drawer.

And at 1:30, shouting is heard from the street.

And the sentence I read earlier follows — that the sight was so pitiful it brought tears to his eyes.

Yet on the same day, with the same hand, he disparages the Declaration of Independence and Son Byung-hi.

Compassion for the students' pure devotion, and contempt for the leaders of the movement, exist in one person at the same time.

He did not join this movement.

Nor did he coldly just watch it from the sidelines.

He wept, and he sneered.

Two days later, March 3, is the day of Emperor Gojong's state funeral.

He writes this.

He even records that the Koreans holding the line snapped at those Japanese, asking what was so funny.

Before the death of his own country's emperor, he was Korean.

He is a man who recorded Japanese rudeness alongside Korean anger.

If we leave this passage out, we are not reading him — we are editing him.

Half a year later, on September 2, 1919, independence fighter Kang Woo-gyu throws a bomb at the newly arriving Governor-General Saito.

The Governor-General was unharmed, but several bystanders were killed or wounded.

That day, he writes this.

What he explicitly criticizes here is the method — assassination and bombing.

His logic is that An Jung-geun's assassination of Ito Hirobumi actually hastened the annexation.

This one sentence cannot settle his stance on independence as a goal in itself, but it is a fact that the same man who wept at the March 1st Movement called armed resistance ‘foolish’ half a year later.

He acknowledges national consciousness, he weeps at the Mansei demonstrations — but the moment someone picks up a gun or throws a bomb, he turns his back.

At least in his writings from this period, his opposition to armed force is unmistakable.

Across many New Year's diary entries in the 1920s and '30s, the same scene repeats.

On New Year's Day 1925, he writes this.

The same pattern repeats on New Year's Day 1930.

He writes that he left his card at the residences of the Governor-General, the Administrative Superintendent-General, and the local chief of police.

And on New Year's Day 1931, he writes this.

This scene reappears even in the year of an assassination attempt, even after the March 1st Movement.

Yet at the very same time, his diary also holds a completely different voice.

On January 11, 1932, he rebuts a Western missionary's claim that Japan is not a militarist state, writing this.

On the 26th of the same month, after reading a newspaper report on Japanese military actions in Shanghai and Manchuria, he writes this.

A man who pays New Year's respects to senior Government-General officials, and a man who bitterly criticizes Japanese military action, exist in the same period, in the same diary.

In his life, collaboration and cynicism never pushed each other out.

Around this time, he becomes involved with an organization called the Heungeop Gurakbu, the Industrial Development Club.

The commonly cited founding date is March 23, 1925, but curiously, his diary that day makes no mention of the organization at all.

Instead, he writes about discussing a mining-rights dispute near his father's grave.

Since it was a secret-society-like organization, he may have deliberately left it out of the diary — or the commonly cited founding date itself may simply be inaccurate.

This investigation could not settle either possibility.

The diary entry for October 4, 1933, reveals a rift within the independence movement of this period.

He records what he heard from Shin Heung-woo and Yeo Woon-hyung like this.

Yun Chi-ho did not confirm that Ahn Chang-ho actually said this — he wrote only that he 'was told' this.

And on the same day, he adds that he himself finds it hard to believe Ahn really said such a thing.

But he also notes that most Northwestern people believed Ahn really did say it.

Shin Heung-woo and Yeo Woon-hyung propose that he help rally Southern forces to counter the Northwestern faction.

Even under the larger goal of standing against Japan, there was hostility dividing region and faction.

He stood right in the middle of that hostility.

And once again, the record breaks off.

The diary, which continues through 1935, reappears in 1938.

For the two years in between, neither the National Institute of Korean History's collection nor the catalog of Emory University in the U.S., which holds the original, has any diary from this period.

In Part 1, we saw a nine-year gap from 1906 to 1915.

That time, there was the Case of the 105 and his imprisonment — at least a reason we could guess at.

This time is different.

There is no record that he was imprisoned, no record that he simply didn't write, no record that anything was lost.

In the catalogs currently available, these two years are simply not there.

Why they are missing, we again cannot confirm.

But just before this gap begins, he had been criticizing Japan's military actions abroad.

And in the record after the gap, his collaboration appears far more clearly in action.

On June 22, 1938, he writes this brief line.

This was an organization led by the Government-General of Korea to mobilize Korea's human and material resources for the war.

With no feeling and no comment, he left only a single businesslike line.

On January 4, 1940, on the Government-General's policy forcing Koreans to adopt Japanese-style surnames, he writes this.

And five months later, on June 17, 1940, he writes this.

The very man who had precisely identified the policy's contradiction five months earlier went on to follow that same policy.

It is the same structure we saw in Part 1 — a clear-eyed diagnosis, and an action that contradicts that very diagnosis, living in one person.

In May 1941, he is appointed a councilor of the Government-General's Central Council, with the treatment of an imperially appointed official.

Between September and October of the same year, he takes part in merging two war-support organizations, the Heunga Bogukdan and the Korean Wartime Patriotic Corps.

And in November 1943, two pieces urging students to volunteer for the student soldier program appear under his name in the Government-General's newspaper, Maeil Sinbo.

‘Go Forth, All of You’ on November 18, and ‘Words from a Notable Sending Off Student Soldiers’ on November 22.

But whether he actually wrote these two pieces, or the Government-General merely borrowed his name, this investigation could not confirm.

That they were published under his name, and that he himself held the pen, are two different things.

What has not been confirmed, we will say has not been confirmed.

Four months before the war ends, on April 3, 1945, he is named one of seven Korean members appointed by imperial order to the House of Peers of the Japanese Imperial Diet.

And that August, Japan surrenders.

About four months later, on December 6, he dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at his eldest son's house in Kaesong.

It was about eight months after his appointment to the House of Peers.

A story that he attempted suicide has spread widely.

But the only confirmed fact is that his final cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage.

This investigation found no material supporting the claim that he attempted suicide.

We will not present what is unconfirmed as fact.

He was never investigated by the Special Committee for Investigating Anti-National Acts.

That's because the committee was formed in October 1948, about three years after his death.

He merely escaped investigation and punishment — he did not escape his actions later being judged as pro-Japanese, anti-national conduct.

In Part 1, we saw him in his twenties, seeing through American racism while despising Chinese immigrants, despairing of the Korean government while admiring Japan.

Today, we have seen where that seed went.

He acknowledged Korean national consciousness while urging appeasement; he wept for the students shouting Mansei while mocking the movement's leaders; he bitterly criticized Japanese militarism while paying New Year's respects at the Government-General's residence every year; he identified the contradiction of forced name-changing while following that very policy.

These sentences do not cancel each other out.

The moment we pick only one side to defend or condemn him, we stop reading him and start reading our own conclusions.

Part 1 was titled 'Two Sentences on the Same Page.'

What we have followed today is the record of those two sentences repeating across an entire lifetime.

He kept an eye that could recognize what was right, and walked a road that eye did not point toward.

Not one sentence read to you today was invented.

The original texts are posted, exactly as they are, on the National Institute of Korean History's Korean History Database.

Anyone can open them directly, right now.