The Lady Kyunghyang (Korean) has an interesting interview with the very elderly Kwon Hee-ro, who did 32 years in a Japanese prison after he killed two yakuza and held 13 hostages at a hot spring inn for four days in 1968 to protest — he says — discrimination against ethnic Koreans in Japan.
In 1999, Kwon returned to Korea to something of a hero’s welcome (or so I was told). TIME Asia covered the story:
When Kwon Hee Ro entered a hostess bar in Shimizu City in central Japan on Feb. 20, 1968, he wasn’t there for the companionship. Without warning, he walked up to a table and shot dead two yakuza gangsters with a hunting rifle. He then fled to a nearby hot springs resort, where he seized 13 hostages and holed up for four days while police and camera crews camped outside. An ethnic Korean, Kwon said he wouldn’t surrender until a Japanese detective he had seen insulting a Korean apologized publicly. Police finally captured him by disguising a group of officers as reporters; Kwon allowed them in for an “interview.” After a trial that lasted eight years, Kwon was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Interesting stuff.
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Maybe I’m getting my stories crossed, but I vaguely remember another man claiming that he had killed a Japanese gangster because he had insulted him for being Korean (a reporter suggested that it was actually over a gambling death). He too would have received a hero’s welcome upon arriving in Korea and then ended up being arrested less than a year later for armed burglary.
2 hours and the grammar Nazi hasn’t spotted the Freudian slip yet?
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