It’s a little late in Korea (2:14am as I type this) but in other countries I can still wish you a happy and meaningful March First Independence Movement Day (????????).
When my wife and I lived back in my home country and attended a Korean-speaking church, every year on the Sunday after ???????? they would read the Proclamation of Independence in Korean and English. Then we would sing the Korean national anthem (???????). I always found this a moving experience, but never quite got my hands on a hardcopy of the Independence Proclamation.
Today I thought I would try to hunt down a copy of the English translation and spread it around to friends. I was surprised to find how difficult this was. It took a good few google searches spread out over a few hours before I could find it. I found plenty of references to it, including a good Wikipedia article on the Samil Movement, and a piece on the same over at kimsoft. But oddly enough, none of the articles I found contained a link to and English translation. (By the way, google.co.kr had a super graphic for today - a ?????? flying in a field of , ???????? - I wish I’d saved it.)
This spurred me on to dig deeper. I found over at Inha University’s School for Stewardesses (don’t we call them flight attendants or cabin crew now?) a page containing the original with all its ????? and also a modernised version (?????????) , although I do not know whether this is an official translation or not.
(By the way I learned something interesting, and that is that the proper name for the document is not, as I had suspected, the ????/???? ????? ???????? or similar, but rather the ???? ???? ????????. ???? in ????? is ?, and it refers to the the 56th binary term of the sexagenary cycle. About this cycle I know precious little, except to say that 1919 was just such a 56th year of the 60 year cycle.)
In the end, I found through google that there were only 6 hits containing full text English translations of the Proclamation. It surprised me. There was also a site called www.koreanindependence.com which contained the original and modern Korean texts, as well as the English translation. But that site did not turn up on google.
I do recommend you go over there and read the text (in whatever form you feel most comfortable with), because it is a significant historical document. I really like it too, and I appreciate the very noble sentiments that it expresses, such as
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.
Gee. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all (Koreans and non Koreans alike) lived up to that?
One of the other pages containing the text was a Gutenberg Project free fulltext book on the Internet, called Korea’s Fight for Freedom. It was published in 1920, and was one of the books of the week in January, 1920 in The Nation - America’s Longest Running Weekly Magazine. For all those who would know mroe about that time of Korea’s history, I encourage you to go read the book on-line - no login process needed. It’s all there, free of charge.
As to who translated the text into the - not the most literary, but workable - English version we have, Kim Young Sik has an excellent essay entitled “The Left-Right Confrontation in Korea ?? Its Origin”, in which he writes:
Park Yong Man was one of the few Koreans who came to America as a student, not as a laborer as in the case of most other Korean immigrants in the early 1900s. He came to America in 1904 and studied at the Hastings Institute in Nebraska. After graduating from Hastings, he studied political science and military science at a college in Lincoln, Nebraska. Upon graduation, he moved to Hawaii and established a Korean military school and formed a Korean paramilitary unit. In October 1917, he represented Korea at the World Conference on Small Nations in New York. When he was in Nebraska, Rhee and he were close friends but later they drifted apart and eventually became bitter enemies.
Park translated the March First declaration of 1919 into English for publication in Hawaii. In May 1919, he joined the American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia as an intelligence agent. His job was to spy on the Koreans in Siberia. The Americans were allies of the Japanese troops in Siberia at the time, and so, Park became a Japanese spy. Paradoxically, Park helped establish a Korean nationalist army at Nikolsk, Siberia.
(I might blog on that essay itself sometime, because it’s a worthwhile piece of history too, from someone who was there for part of it.)
Elsewhere, in an interesting essay on Yo Un-hyung, Lee Wha Rang writes:
“Park Yong-man established a military academy in America for the purpose of training Korean officers. Later Park became a Japanese informer and was executed by Kim Gu’s military chief, Gen. Ji Jung-chun.”
Well! Talk about the ironies of history!
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9 Comments
When I was in high school, the ???????????????? was one of those texts (like the ??????????, ????????????, etc.) in the ????? textbook that everyone had to memorize word for word, including the ?????, definitions, etymologies, etc. in order to answer the test questions. It’s been more than ten years, but I still remember the first few words: ????? ?????? ???…
Good to see you back, limping like a beat dog, but your back.
Anyways I did a little history research with my students anbout Samil Day, or 3, 1 day. Check it out at my site.
wooj: you’re showing your age. When I asked 6 college students today whether they’d had to memorise it they told me no.
Thanks for the informative links!
By the way, I saved the 3.1 day google logo. anyone who wants it, please let me know.
Can memorization lead to internalization? France has just (reluctantly) voted to make schools teach their own national anthem, La Marseillaise. Indeed, a very brave and compelling war song. How has it served them since the Revolution?
Paradoxically, I was pleased that this Proclamation was dated by the correct Korean Year (1919= 4252), while also disappointed that it contains the popular meme “Korea has 5000 years of history”, which is absurd and just makes Korea’s overseas PR look bad when it is claimed. I had actually thought that this 5000-year claim had originated with the Park Chun-hee dictatorship in the 1970s, in open imitation of the Japanese fascists; I was surprised when I found that was included in this 1919 Declaration…
Korea really only has 700 or 800 years of history.
Whats the oldest Korean book? Samguksagi - compiled in the late 1200’s by Kim Pu Shik.
Whats the oldest significant Korean text? Kwanggyet’otaewangreungbimun (Gravestone inscription of the Great King Kwanggyet’o) from AD 391. Koreans detest this text (and implausibly claim it is partially fraudulent) because it contains the story of Paekje allying Japan against Koguryeo.
Whats the oldest mention of Korean-like people in any ancient book? Samgukji (Three [Chinese] Kingdom’s History) from sometime between AD 233-297, written by a Chinese guy.
Where does the “5000 years of history” claim come from? Late 19th/early 20th-century nationalist readings of the Samgukyusa (again compiled in late 1200s) passage which discusses the founding of Kochosun (Ancient Chosun) by a guy named T’angun who lived for over 1000 years. Pak Chung Hee started using “T’angi” - or T’angun Years - in the 1970s I believe, and thats where this “year 4252″ stuff comes from.
Wow, Korea is really weird.
“Pak Chung Hee started using ?橫T??angi?? - or T??angun Years - in the 1970s I believe, and thats where this ??year 4252?? stuff comes from.”
But that doesn’t explain how that year got used on a document that was verifiably written in 1919. So unless President Park had a secret time machine (and he had a secret nukes project, so I won’t say it’s impossible) then the usage must predate Park by some decades at least.
A question and a comment:
There seems to be an interesting relationship between the death of ???? and the 1919 independence movement. A lot of the activity that year appears to have been an outpouring the wake of his passing. Also, the ????? ???? ?????? ????? (provisional gov’t) was formed that year in Shanghai. In the latter case, were the people involved hoping to restore ????穫 ???? (the Korean Empire) while ???? was still alive, then proclaimed the former ????? ???? as a republic (????) after his death?
Regarding the 60-year cycle (???? ?????/????????), it worked like this: each year (?????/?, for example), is named by 2 characters. The first character is one of the “10 heavenly stems” (????/????); the second is one of the 12 zodiacal signs or “earthly branches” (????/????), I believe they’re often called in English. The first year in the cycle is ????? (???), a combination of the first heavenly stem and the first zodiacal sign. (1984 was the last ?????? year.) From there, the ???? proceed in six ten-year cycles and the ????? proceed asynchronously in five twelve-year cycles. ?? and ??? coincide again every sixty years. Just as many modern events (????? ????, ?????? ??????) are named for the date they started on, many more historical events are named for the year they occurred in. So there’s the ???? (????) ?????, the reforms of 1895; and the ?????? (??) ???? in 1905, when Korea became a Japanese protectorate.
Many ????? ?????? (at least those by ???? ????) have a table of the ?뢮?? ?????. A good exposition on it in English is in the appendix to Paul H. Crane’s book Korean Patterns, published by the Royal Asiatic Society.