Three Days After the Trial

On September 13, the Gyeongseong District Court [gyuhng-sung; pronounced “Keijō” by the Japanese colonial administration] held proceedings tied to the 1st and 2nd Korean Communist Party incidents — cases that had begun with arrests in Sinuiju in November 1925.

We were unable to verify a specific front-page headline text from Korean-language newspapers dated September 16 itself in this round of research. What is well documented is that the case, and its social weight, continued to dominate conversation in Gyeongseong for days afterward.
Source: secondary historical research on the Korean Communist Party trials, cross-referenced with Korean historical databases

🏛️ Government-General of Korea Official Records

No specific gazette content for this date was confirmed. Around this time, however, the Government-General was in the final weeks of construction on its new headquarters building near Gwanghwamun, due for completion the following month.

✊ Eight Months in Mokpo

On January 15, 1926, the Mokpo Oil-Mill Workers’ Union held an emergency general meeting and walked out, demanding that the workday be shortened from twelve hours to ten. The company responded by firing the strikers and circulating a blacklist to other factories in the area.

Local labor groups — a free labor union, a printers’ fellowship, a woodworkers’ association — rallied in support. By mid-September the strike had crossed the eight-month mark, sustained under continuing pressure from police and management.

Overseas Korean Newspapers: Labor disputes of this scale were closely watched by Korean expatriate communities in Shanghai and Manchuria, who followed them as part of the broader picture of colonial economic exploitation.
Source: academic research on the 1926 Mokpo oil-workers’ strike (Local History and Local Culture journal); labor history retrospectives

🏭 Thursday Focus: The Labor Landscape

A twelve-hour workday was ordinary across colonial Korean industry in 1926. What made Mokpo notable wasn’t the demand itself — ten hours was hardly radical — but the sheer length of the resistance it took to even ask for it.

Why This Matters for International Readers: The eight-hour movement had already reshaped labor law in much of the industrialized West by the mid-1920s. Colonial Korea’s workers were fighting, years later and with far fewer legal protections, for terms their counterparts elsewhere had already partly secured.

🇨🇳 China – The Northern Expedition

Context for International Readers: The National Revolutionary Army, allied at this stage with Chinese Communists, had been advancing north from Guangzhou since July 1926, fighting to reunify China against competing warlords.

On September 6 and 7, the NRA captured Hanyang and Hankou, two of the “Three Towns of Wuhan.” By September 16, ten days later, it was still pressing toward Wuchang, the last of the three — which would fall on October 10.

Korean exiles in China, including independence fighters based in Shanghai, followed the Northern Expedition closely as a possible shift in the regional balance of power.

🇯🇵 Japan – Managing an Empire

The Late Taishō Period: Japan in 1926 was in the final months of the Taishō era’s brief democratic flowering, even as colonial administration in Korea grew more entrenched — visible that autumn in the near-complete Government-General headquarters in Seoul, and in the ongoing prosecution of Korean Communist Party members.

🇷🇺 Soviet Union & Manchuria

Manchuria remained the largest hub of Korean exile life outside the peninsula — home to farmers displaced by colonial land policy and to independence movement networks that kept close watch on both the Chinese civil conflict and news from home, including the communist trial in Seoul.

🇺🇸 United States

Los Angeles County District Attorney Asa Keyes ordered the arrest of five people, including the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, on charges of conspiring to corrupt public morals — a case tied to her disputed 1926 disappearance and reappearance.

🇮🇹 Italy & Romania

Italy and Romania signed a Treaty of Friendship, pairing a substantial Italian loan with Romanian oil concessions — a small but telling instance of interwar Europe’s economic diplomacy.

🇯🇵 Japan (Industrial)

Shin-Etsu Chemical Company was founded on this date — a corporation that would grow into one of Japan’s major chemical manufacturers over the following century.

🎭 New York

“Broadway,” a crime drama by George Abbott and Philip Dunning, premiered at the Broadhurst Theatre — part of a booming Jazz Age theater scene an ocean and a colonized peninsula away from Mokpo’s picket lines.

🇮🇳 India Under British Rule

By 1926, Indian labor organizing was gaining ground alongside the independence movement, with textile and railway strikes echoing the same basic demand Mokpo’s workers were making: shorter hours, and the right to say no to unbearable conditions without losing everything.

🇮🇪 Ireland – Rebuilding a Free State

Four years into independence, Ireland was still absorbing the costs of its own civil war. For Korean nationalists watching from Shanghai and Manchuria, Ireland remained proof that even a long occupation could end — a fact that made both the Mokpo strike and the communist trial feel, to their participants, like part of the same unfinished struggle.

💡 A Note on Sources: No individual striker from Mokpo could be identified by name in this round of research. What follows instead reconstructs the position of a typical oil-mill worker there in September 1926, based on verified facts about the strike’s demands, timeline, and organizational structure.

🌅 Morning

In Gyeongseong, the Bosingak bell in Jongno marked the start of the day as market vendors opened their stalls at Namdaemun.

☀️ Afternoon

Factories across the peninsula ran their standard long shifts; in Mokpo, the idled oil mill stood as a visible reminder of the standoff.

🌆 Evening

Cafés lit up in Myeongdong, a narrator’s voice carried through Chosun Theater, and near Gwanghwamun the unfinished Government-General building stood dark against the sky.