The birth of Korean nationhood

On March 1, 1919, a crowd gathered in Pagoda Park in downtown Seoul to hear proclaimed that “Korea is an independent state and Koreans are a self-governing people.” That statement, known as the March 1 declaration, came in direct defiance of Japanese rule, which had begun in 1910. The organisers then spanned out to lead citywide marches, waving their arms and shouting, “Mansei!” (the equivalent of “Long live Korea!”).

Seoul was already a powder keg. The police were out in force that week as countless thousands of Koreans arrived in the city for the funeral of Gojong, Korea’s previous monarch, who had died in January. Still, the magnitude of the protests caught the colonial security forces off guard. Passions on both sides soon spread around the peninsula, leading to a weekslong explosion of violence that resulted in thousands dead, tens of thousands arrested, and the destruction of countless homes, public spaces and even places of worship. Outsiders at the time also detected the significance of the event.

The New York Times, which had a correspondent in Beijing, reported the widespread fervour of the colonised, the “barbarous cruelties” of the colonial authorities and the simmering tensions across the peninsula. The discontent had been building for some time. Even before the Japanese annexation in 1910, Koreans had endured five years as a forced Japanese protectorate, the result of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Then, in the first decade of colonial rule, Japan placed stifling restrictions on Koreans’ public lives in the name of security.

Koreans studying in Japan enjoyed greater liberties, however, and they were among the first to recognise the implications of Woodrow Wilson’s well-publicised emphasis on national self-determination. On Feb 8, 1919, Korean students in Tokyo read aloud a statement of independence, drawing upon an independence declaration by Korean resistance leaders in Manchuria a few days earlier. The Manchurian document had aimed to rally the fighting spirit of fellow Koreans, but the Feb 8 declaration was directed at the “world’s nations,” particularly the United States and Britain, the “masters of world reform.” Written by Yi Gwang-su, perhaps Korea’s greatest modern novelist, the declaration pledged to “follow the model of the advanced democratic nations that are based on justice and freedom” in establishing an independent Korea that would join the League of Nations.

The statement, full of dismay over Japanese domination, ended with veiled threats of armed action if the Japanese Empire did not immediately grant Korean independence. Three weeks later, the March 1 declaration also condemned a wide range of Japanese abuses, but it omitted references to bitterness, democracy or even the league, instead emphasising pacifist resistance. Still, the document alluded to the “spirit of the times” in stressing the desire to join the “great movement for world reform.” Readers and listeners also noticed a religious undertone in the insistence that “we shall not blame Japan; we must first blame ourselves before finding fault with others.”

While the words were written by Choe Nam-seon, a pioneering poet and historian who infused the prose with flourish, its core ideas came from the declaration’s 33 signers, a collection of clergymen from Protestantism, Buddhism and what a New York Times report referred to as “Heaven worshippers,” the native non-Christian religious movement formally called the Church of the Heavenly Way. In 1894, this religion’s earlier incarnation had inspired followers to organise the largest uprising in the history of the Joseon dynasty, which set off a series of events hastening the kingdom’s end.

Korea’s loss of sovereignty to Japan in 1910 occurred in a tumultuous era shaped by external forces both threatening and enlightening: Imperialist pressures proved impossible to overcome, but they also aroused an acute awareness of Korean nationhood. Although such aspirations were firmly quashed during the opening years of colonial rule, the March 1 demonstrations of 1919, and particularly the calamities of their bloody suppression, compelled the Japanese government to change its approach. That fall, the new colonial administration declared a liberalised policy of “cultural rule” that stressed the “harmony of Japan and Korea.”

This did not mean Koreans would gain independence, or even that the mechanisms of autocratic foreign occupation would weaken. But it did mark the peak formative period of modern Korean nationhood. Koreans could now participate much more freely in publishing, religion and business, and they formed and joined organisations dedicated to all kinds of cultural, intellectual and economic endeavours. This produced the first canon of great modern literary works, fostered competing articulations of national identity and even prompted the standardisation of written Korean. But these hopeful developments came to a screeching halt when Japan, during the Pacific War of 1937-1945, imposed a total mobilisation, which included abuses such as forced labor, sexual slavery and an attempt to obliterate a distinctive Korean identity.

Under intense strain, even revered figures like Yi and Choe, who had eloquently given voice to their countrymen’s longing for independence, now called for Koreans to become “imperial subjects” of the Japanese emperor and sacrifice their lives for Japan’s wars. Kim managed to survive the Japanese hunt for him in the late 1930s and, after holding out in the Soviet Union, accompanied the Russians into Pyongyang in 1945. There he maneuvered into position as the Soviets’ main Korean representative in their northern occupation zone. In an effort to compensate for this dependence, Kim’s regime devised the nativist, isolationist ideology of “Juche,” which would undergird his totalitarian rule over North Korea until his death in 1994.

But Juche, commonly rendered as “self-reliance,” was itself an extreme offshoot of the “self-determination” that had inspired the events of 1919. To a degree, then, North Korea’s history can be traced to the rhetorical winds stirred up by an American president, Woodrow Wilson. According to North Korea’s national history narrative, March 1 should be celebrated as a noble failure, a stirring expression of the people’s struggle for freedom that fell short because it was headed by bourgeois leaders instead of a great socialist hero. That would be, of course, Kim himself, who as a six-year-old boy is said to have participated in the protests but apparently was too young to lead the revolution.

The Korean Provisional Government, on the other hand, is not even considered, which is understandable given that the Korean communist movements, after a bitter fallout with the KPG in 1919, continued to denigrate the group thereafter. South Korea, on the other hand, has fully embraced March 1 and the KPG. The constitution of the new South Korean state, founded in 1948 and called the Republic of Korea, appropriated March 1 in establishing its legitimacy. This connection remains today in the preamble, which talks of “upholding the cause of the Provisional Republic of Korea Government born of the March First Independence Movement of 1919.”

Every year on March 1, a national holiday in South Korea, children are trotted out to schoolyards dressed in costumes, singing the March 1 Song and waving the Korean flag to show their March 1 spirit. Then they march into the streets to watch awkward performances featuring actors dressed as Japanese policemen shooting at valiant demonstrators, as onlookers boo and cheer while chomping on dried squid. The March 1 commemorations have become a long-standing rite of spring, marking the beginning of the school year and seasonally regenerating anti-Japanese sentiment. This year’s centenary promised the biggest commemorations of all, not only in Korea but in diasporic communities around the world.

The global reach of 1919 in Korean history reflects the universalised promises made by the architects of the peace at Versailles, which inspired developments far from the shattered landscapes of Europe. The long-term outcomes, however, were decidedly mixed. Last year during their summit, the two leaders of North and South Korea pledged to organise a joint celebration of the coming March 1 centenary. The plan fizzled, and maybe for the best. For while the events of spring 1919 facilitated later independence movements and the flowering of Korean culture and identity, they also unleashed catastrophic forces that eventually divided the country, perhaps forever.