Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
Two of the most important groups in the growing democratic opposition were students and the Christian community, both traditional foes of tyranny in Korea. The unusual stature of students in Korean society and especially in political activism is the product of a tradition stretching back over many centuries. Undergirded by the Confucian emphasis on scholarship, students had spearheaded nationalistic movements against Japanese colonial rule. They saw themselves, and were seen by others, as guardians of state virtue and purity, and they were expected to demonstrate opposition to any compromise with those ideals.
The practice of student political activism had been powerfully reinforced in the early 1960s. Massive student protests in 1960 against Syngman Rhee’s increasingly authoritarian government were halted by
police gunfire that killed 130 students and wounded another 1,000 in Seoul alone. The government’s brutality robbed it of legitimacy in the eyes of the public and led to its replacement. The military coup led by General Park that took over the government by force in 1961 was never accepted as legitimate by many activist students, who passionately opposed the existence of military-dominated regimes.
After liberation from Japan, the thirst for education had led to rapid growth in the South Korean student population, from fewer than 8,000 college and university students in 1945 to 223,000 by 1973. Although only a small percentage of Korean students were politically active, this vanguard was intensely engaged, prone to rigid, often radical political and social theories, and ready to do battle with government authority by employing their bodies as well as their voices.
Christianity, too, was strongly associated with Korea’s resistance to Japan’s colonial rule. As advocates and symbols of Western-oriented modernization, Christians have had high prestige in Korean society. From an estimated 300,000 in North and South Korea in 1945, the number of Christians had grown rapidly by 1974 to an estimated 4.3 million in South Korea (3.5 million Protestants and 800,000 Roman Catholics). Except for the largely Catholic Philippines, South Korea is the most Christianized country in Asia.
As the dissident movement grew, the government periodically cracked down with detentions and arrests. Virtually no news of this confrontation appeared in the tightly controlled Korean press, though due to the international press and the many outside connections of regime opponents, the struggle was well publicized outside Korea. The governments of the United States, Japan, and a number of European countries were uncomfortable and made their views known in official démarches and unofficial statements, urging Seoul to take a path of caution and moderation.
In Washington, congressional criticism of Park’s human rights policies and the activities of the KCIA in intimidating Korean Americans led to Capitol Hill hearings and congressionally mandated cuts in US military aid to South Korea. Seoul’s response to these political pressures was to try, in time-honored Korean fashion, to purchase favor in ways that presaged scandals in the 1990s over Asian efforts to influence US politics. This included sealed envelopes with thousands of dollars in hundred-dollar bills handed to a White House aide. The US Embassy strongly objected, to little avail.
Early in 1974, Park used his martial-law powers to issue emergency decrees criminalizing criticism of the constitution and outlawing a student federation as subversive. Violators faced trial by closed military courts. A confidential US military assessment quoted intelligence sources as saying that “there was little or no validity to the charge of communist activity by
the students” but that the accusation appeared designed “to tarnish opposition to the government with a communist image and to justify the repressive measures.”
By the time of the August 15 Independence Day celebration, nearly two hundred people had been sentenced to death or long prison terms under the emergency decrees. Among those found guilty were a prominent Roman Catholic bishop, a popular dissident poet, and the only living former president of South Korea, Yun Po Sun. The struggle within the South, added to the permanent conflict with the North, made Seoul as tense as a war zone. When Park moved from room to room in his presidential mansion, the corridors were cleared of all but essential people because of what a senior US Embassy official called his “morbid fear of assassination” by North Koreans.
All this was in the background when the gunshots rang out in the National Theater. In view of the intensity of the internal struggle, there had been a growing sense that Seoul’s crisis was reaching an explosive point. A sudden act of violence was not so surprising. But from what direction had the gunshots come? Political dissidents? A rival military group? And what would happen next, now that Park had survived the attack?
The man who tried to change Korean history with a .38 caliber pistol was a twenty-two-year-old Korean resident of Osaka, Japan, who confessed to being instructed and assisted by an official of a North Korea–oriented residents association in Japan. The identity of the would-be assassin and the fact that his attack had been launched from Japan led to a serious crisis between the two US allies in Northeast Asia, which were closely intertwined economically but had never come to terms politically with their unhappy history.
Mun Se Kwang had flown from Japan to South Korea on August 6, bringing a handgun stolen from a Japanese police station and concealed in a radio. He checked in to Korea’s best hotel and on the morning of the Independence Day ceremony hired a limousine and driver from the hotel, paying him extra to perform obsequious bows at the entrance to the National Theater. Mun then strode past dozens of security officers as if he were an important guest.
The assassin had planned to shoot Park in the lobby, but failed to get an unobstructed view. As the ceremony began, he was swept inside and was only able to find a seat close to the back of the large hall. Near the middle of Park’s address, he rose from his seat, intending to stride quickly down the center aisle, pause, and take careful aim as he had been trained to do. But as Mun moved into position, he accidentally squeezed the trigger
of his pistol, and the gun went off, grazing his left thigh. At that point, the gunman made a run for it down the aisle, firing rapidly—but not accurately—as he ran.
Taken to KCIA headquarters and treated for his superficial wound, the gunman initially insisted he was “a revolutionary warrior” who should be treated as a prisoner of war. For a full day, he refused to say anything more than his name, Mun Se Kwang, and his address in Osaka. On the second day, one of the Korean prosecutors said to Mun, “You are a jackal, aren’t you?” With this reference to the Frederick Forsythe novel
The Day of the Jackal
, about a plot to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle, Mun for the first time looked startled and showed emotion. He answered, “Yes.” Assured that he would be treated not as a common criminal but as a man who was “looking for something big,” Mun began to confess.
Korea and Japan, which are separated only by a narrow body of water, have a complex and tangled history, with more periods of conflict than friendly relations. Continental Asian culture originally made its way to Japan via the Korean peninsula. The two countries share an overlapping cultural heritage, yet in many ways the tension between them is more impressive. For all their recorded history, Japan has been more populous and militarily stronger. In modern times, imperial Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1905 until its downfall in 1945 left bitter resentment on the part of Koreans. The Japanese, for their part, mixed feelings of superiority with trepidation about the Koreans in their midst and abroad.
During the Japanese occupation and especially during World War II, more than 2 million Koreans were forcibly brought to Japan, mainly as laborers. Although most were repatriated after Japan’s defeat, about 600,000 remained, largely in the lowest-paying and least-skilled jobs. By 1974 they constituted the main exception to Japan’s famed homogeneity, making up nearly nine-tenths of the entire “alien” population amid 108 million Japanese. Although Mun Se Kwang, like many others, was born and raised in Japan, and could not even speak Korean, his birth certificate and alien registration papers described him as a South Korean whose permanent home was near Pusan. Under law and practice in Japan, he and others like him had little hope of ever becoming Japanese citizens and were relegated to secondary jobs and status.
One year earlier, Japan had been furious at the violation of its sovereignty in the Tokyo kidnapping of South Korean opposition leader Kim Dae Jung. Now, after Mun Se Kwang’s deadly run down the aisle of the National Theater on the day commemorating Korean liberation from Japan, it was Seoul’s turn to be furious. Mun was a resident of Japan, had used a Japanese police pistol, and had entered Korea on a Japanese passport obtained under false pretenses. Citing these facts, the South Korean president demanded an apology from Japan, punishment of all those in
Japan who were connected with the case, and disbandment of the pro–North Korean residents association, Chosen Soren. Japan balked at such strong measures, and to make matters worse, the Japanese Foreign Ministry issued a statement refusing to accept any Japanese responsibility for the assassination attempt.
Park and others were outraged. The speaker of the ROK National Assembly, Chung Il Kwon, said Japan’s reaction “shows how much they despise and look down on Koreans. . . . If [Chinese leader] Mao’s wife had been killed by a Chinese raised in Japan, the Japanese prime minister would crawl on his hands and knees from Tsingtao to Beijing to apologize for Japan’s responsibility, but they sneer at us because we’re Korean.” Because of Japanese mishandling and latent anti-Japanese sentiments, South Korea seemed more furious about the involvement of Japan than about that of the North Koreans who hatched the assassination plot.
Park personally summoned the Japanese ambassador and threatened dire consequences if Japan did not cooperate. To emphasize his anger, Park refused to speak to the ambassador in Japanese—though, having been a lieutenant in the Japanese army, he knew the language perfectly—insisting that his foreign minister interpret his words instead. As added pressure, Park instigated and orchestrated daily anti-Japanese demonstrations in the capital, during one of which protesters chopped off their fingers in ritual sacrifice against Japan and marched on to storm the Japanese Embassy and smear its walls with blood. Most important, Park made serious preparations to break off diplomatic relations with Japan and nationalize all Japanese assets in Korea if satisfaction was not forthcoming.
At that moment, the United States was transfixed with its own domestic crisis. Just six days before the assassination attempt in Seoul, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency as a result of the Watergate scandal, and Gerald Ford became president. Although Asia experts in Washington were aghast at the dangerous breach between the two US allies, the orders to American diplomats were to stay out of the dispute.
Disregarding the instructions, Deputy Chief of Mission Richard Ericson, in charge of the embassy in Seoul after the departure of Philip Habib to be assistant secretary of state, placed his career on the line to work out a face-saving accommodation. In secret meetings with Japanese Embassy officials and ROK prime minister Kim Jong Pil, Ericson arranged a carefully phrased Japanese letter of regret, pledges of a limited crackdown on “criminal acts” of pro–North Korean elements in Japan, and a peacemaking visit to Seoul by a respected Japanese elder statesman.
The showdown with the mistrusted Japanese and the venting of national emotion over the killing of Park’s wife temporarily unified the South Korean body politic behind Park. He took advantage of the changed political climate
to repeal the most draconian of the emergency decrees, for the moment easing the confrontation with his domestic opponents.
The most profound impact of the shooting, however, was to remove the influence of the first lady, who had been highly popular among even those who feared or disliked her husband. Yook Young Soo (Korean women keep their maiden names after marriage) had been Park’s second wife, or third if one counts a common-law liaison in the late 1940s. She had come from a prominent family and was graceful, physically attractive, and articulate—all the things he was not. She had been a check and balance for her husband, a sounding board and humanizing influence. Following her death, Park became even more isolated, withdrawn, and remote.
Ten weeks after his wife’s death, Park wrote in the diary that he kept, “Already into the last week of October! The dying fall holds only loneliness. In the garden the chrysanthemums bloom, beautiful, peaceful, as they did a year ago, but the autumn leaves, falling one by one, only make me sad.”
Mun Se Kwang was convicted of attacking the president and killing his wife and on December 20, 1974, was hanged in a Seoul prison.
In November, three months after the assassination attempt on Park, a South Korean army squad on routine patrol discovered steam rising from high grass in the southern part of the demilitarized zone, about two-thirds of a mile south of the military demarcation line that marks the border. Hoping to find a hot spring, a soldier poked his bayonet into the ground, which gave way to a widening hole, revealing the top of a reinforced tunnel about eighteen inches below the surface. As the soldiers probed further, they were interrupted by automatic weapons fire from a North Korean guard post. They returned fire before breaking off the engagement, the first clash of arms between the two opposing armies in twenty months.
Further exploration revealed a sophisticated underground construction about four feet high and three feet wide, with walls of reinforced concrete, electric lines and lighting, areas for sleeping and weapons storage, and a narrow-gauge railway for excavating soil. The US Command calculated that about two thousand troops could be squeezed into the tunnel from its source, about two miles away in North Korea, to its planned exit south of the DMZ, and that additional troops could be put through at a rate of five to seven hundred men per hour. Suddenly, American and South Korean forces faced a threat of surprise attack behind their forward defense lines.