August 15: The Day Korea Got Its Country Back After 35 Years

Introduction

If you spend time in Korea, one of the first things you learn is that August 15 is a day off. It is marked in red on the calendar, and on that morning you see the Korean flag, 태극기 (Taegeukgi), hanging on government buildings and apartment balconies. You know it is a holiday, but it is easy to let the day pass without ever finding out why.

August 15 is 광복절 (Gwangbokjeol, Liberation Day). Gwangbok means to recover the light. It is the day Korea came out from under Japanese rule and got its country back.¹

1910: Korea Lost Its Country

On August 29, 1910, Japan took over the Korean Empire by force and made it part of Japan.² The Korean Empire was the name of the country at that time. From that day until 1945, for 35 years, Koreans could not govern their own country. Koreans call this period 일제강점기 (Ilje gangjeomgi), the Japanese colonial period.

Even before that, there were people trying to hold on to the country. An Chang-ho opened Daeseong School in Pyongyang in September 1908. The idea was to raise people who could defend the country, and Japanese authorities shut the school down in 1912.³ On October 26, 1909, An Jung-geun shot the Japanese politician Ito Hirobumi at Harbin Station in China. After his arrest, in Lushun Prison, he began writing an essay arguing that Korea, China, and Japan should live side by side in peace. He planned it in five parts. He had finished two when he was executed on March 26, 1910.⁴

Korean Disappeared From Schools, and Names Changed

The colonial period began five months after An Jung-geun's execution. From the late 1930s, daily life itself changed. A rule change in 1938 turned Korean into a subject students no longer had to take, and class hours were cut sharply. Speaking Korean at school was banned as well.⁵

From February 11, 1940, Koreans had to take Japanese-style names and register them. Those who did not had trouble getting their children into school, and they were refused food rations.⁶ Keeping your name meant putting your child's schooling and your family's meals on the line.

As the war dragged on, people were taken too. Under a law made in 1939, Koreans were sent to workplaces chosen for them. They had to go whether they wanted to or not, and this is called forced mobilization. According to Japanese records, at least 767,000 Koreans were mobilized outside the country between 1939 and March 1945, to Japan, Sakhalin, islands in the Pacific, and other places.⁷ Neither the people leaving nor the families staying behind knew when they would see each other again. The Japanese military set up comfort stations in occupied areas and garrison towns, and women from Korea and other regions were taken there. They are known as victims of the Japanese military "comfort women" system.⁸

March 1, 1919: People Went Out Into the Streets

On March 1, 1919, in the ninth year of colonial rule, Koreans went out into the streets and called for independence. The protests spread across the entire country, and this is what Koreans call the March First Movement.⁹

Yu Gwan-sun, a student in Seoul at the time, was one of them. She went back to her hometown and led a demonstration on April 1 at the Aunae market in Byeongcheon, South Chungcheong Province. She was arrested and held at Seodaemun Prison in Seoul, and she died there on September 28, 1920. She was seventeen.¹⁰

On April 11, just weeks after the March First Movement, the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea was formed in Shanghai, China. It was a government set up outside the country. An Chang-ho, who had opened the school, worked there too.¹¹

The War Ended, and Korea Got Its Country Back After 35 Years

The immediate trigger was the end of the war. Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and on Nagasaki on August 9, and on August 9 the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan.¹²¹³ On August 14, Japan agreed to accept the Allied Powers' demand for surrender, and it announced the surrender the following day. The Allied Powers were the countries fighting Japan, among them the United States, the United Kingdom, and China.¹⁴ Counting from 1910, it had taken 35 years.

Through all of those years, Koreans kept demanding independence. On September 17, 1940, the Provisional Government formed an army called the Korean Liberation Army in Chongqing, China.¹⁵ In July 1943, people from the Provisional Government met the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek and asked him to support Korean independence. That November, at a conference in Cairo, Egypt, the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom, and China declared that Korea would become free and independent "in due course." Korea was the only country in Asia whose independence the Allied Powers promised.¹⁶

The Korean Liberation Army also prepared an operation to enter the Korean Peninsula alongside a United States intelligence agency. Fifty of its members trained for three months from May 1945. Then Japan surrendered just before the operation was to begin, and it was called off. On August 16, the Provisional Government sent an advance unit that reached Yeouido airfield in Seoul on August 18, but the Japanese troops stationed there blocked it, and the unit went back to China on August 19.¹⁷ After years of preparation, Koreans never got to take the country back by fighting for it themselves.

The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture puts it this way. Korea's liberation was clearly a result of Japan's defeat, but it is doubtful that this defeat would have led straight to Korea's liberation without the independence movement Koreans had kept alive.¹³

Three Years Later, Another August 15

It took three more years for the recovered country to have a Korean government of its own. Right after liberation, the Korean Peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel, with the United States military in charge in the south and the Soviet military in the north.¹⁸ On May 10, 1948, a general election in the south produced a national assembly, and a constitution was promulgated on July 17. On August 15, the founding of the government of the Republic of Korea was proclaimed.¹⁹

Gwangbokjeol marks both of those days, August 15, 1945 and August 15, 1948.¹ It is a public holiday, so government offices and schools are closed.²⁰

Wrapping Up

Gwangbokjeol is a day for feeling grateful to the people who worked to get the country back. The country they recovered is the Korea of today, and that is why the flag goes up on the morning of August 15.

Share this with someone preparing to come to Korea.

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