[100 Years Ago Today] August 23, 1926 – As Summer

Korea Under Colonial Rule

Before dawn on August 4, 1926, Yun Sim-deok, Korea’s first professionally trained soprano, and playwright Kim Woo-jin vanished from a ferry crossing the Genkai Strait between Shimonoseki and Busan. Their bodies were never recovered. Rumors of a double love-suicide, jeongsa, swept the peninsula through the summer.

Three days before she disappeared, Yun had recorded one final song at a studio in Osaka: “In Praise of Death,” her own Korean lyrics set to Ivanovici’s “Waves of the Danube.” That record reached Gyeongseong shops in late August — sources differ on the exact release day — and by this Monday, her voice was audible from record stalls across Jongno and Bonjeong. Curiosity mixed with grief; disapproval of the “new woman” and free love mixed with genuine mourning.

Colonial Parallels & the Peninsula

A different tension held the streets around the Gyeongseong District Court. Since June 10 — the day of Emperor Sunjong’s state funeral, when students launched the June 10th Movement in a wave of independence protests — eleven defendants indicted on June 25 for violating publication and public-order laws had spent the summer under interrogation. Their trial would not open until November; August was still a season of depositions.

Similar patterns of colonial censorship and student resistance were playing out across the empire that decade — from British India to French-ruled Vietnam — wherever a funeral, a festival, or a single printed line could become the spark for a street protest.

The World Stage

Across the Atlantic, in New York, silent-film idol Rudolph Valentino died shortly after noon this day, at age 31, from complications following emergency surgery for a ruptured ulcer. His death would trigger one of the era’s most extraordinary outpourings of public grief — riots outside the funeral home, fainting fans, rumors of suicides among his admirers.

The day before, wire reports from Greece told of a bloodless coup: General Georgios Kondylis had ousted dictator Theodoros Pangalos. Power and fame, it seemed, could both dissolve overnight that summer — a Hollywood idol’s life, a European strongman’s regime.

Understanding Daily Life in Gyeongseong

Not every corner of the city was in mourning. The Dong-A Ilbo’s four-school baseball league — fielding alumni and students from Baejae, Jungang, Hwimun, and Kyungshin — had begun that month, and schoolyards rang with a very different kind of noise than the gramophone shops. Students walked to class in the cooler morning air; market vendors called out through midday; by dusk, the smell of dinner drifted through the alleys. As Cheoseo passed, the cicadas grew quieter, and people began talking about the coming harvest.

Century Mirror

A century separates the pace at which Yun Sim-deok’s last song traveled from mouth to mouth and the speed at which a single today circles the globe. What hasn’t changed, perhaps, is how readily people lean on a song when grief and love collide.