A Sunday in Gyeongseong

Autumn had settled over Gyeongseong on this Sunday morning. Across the Gwanghwamun intersection, the new Government-General building was receiving its final touches, with just nineteen days left until its dedication ceremony on October 1 — the anniversary marking the start of Japanese colonial administration. Church bells and temple bells rang in turn across the city. But the minds of ordinary Koreans were elsewhere: on the trial that would open the very next morning.

Korea Under Colonial Rule

As this paper reported on September 2, 4, and 6, the massive new Government-General building rising on the grounds of Gyeongbok Palace was nearly complete, its dedication timed for October 1. The brick walls that day-laboring workers had carried, one load at a time, now formed a towering stone structure. Word had spread that Gwanghwamun Gate, which stood directly in the new building’s line of sight, would not be demolished after all — instead, it would be relocated toward Geonchunmun. Even some Japanese scholars, including Yanagi Muneyoshi, were said to have joined Koreans in opposing its destruction. The exact timing of the move remained unconfirmed, but the news that the gate would survive, at least in some form, was enough to make passersby pause.

At the same hour, behind the walls of Seodaemun Prison, students from Chungang School remained in custody, still awaiting trial for their role in the June Tenth Movement. On June 10, as Emperor Sunjong’s funeral procession passed through Jongno, some three hundred students had shouted “Korean independence, manse” and scattered manifestos. Three months later, on this Sunday, their sentences had still not been handed down — the verdict would not come for another two months. Shops along Jongno kept half-day Sunday hours, and worshippers dispersed from morning services in Jeong-dong. Beneath the calm, tension over the trial opening the next day quietly ran through the city.

East Asia in Turmoil

The following day, September 13, the Gyeongseong District Court was set to open proceedings in the so-called First and Second Korean Communist Party cases — trials of Tuesday-faction Korean Communist Party members whose network had collapsed following the June Tenth crackdown. The whole country’s attention turned toward the capital.

Far to the south, in Mokpo, a different struggle dragged on. As this paper reported on September 9, workers at the Mokpo oil-refining union had been on strike for many months, resisting both company appeasement and police pressure by organizing a “death squad” of committed strikers, drawing support from allied social organizations across the region. Word of their endurance reached even Gyeongseong.

The World Stage

Across the sea in Geneva, the Locarno Treaties were set to formally enter into force in two days, on September 14. Germany had been admitted to a permanent seat on the League of Nations Council on September 8, and on September 10, German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann had taken the podium to deliver a speech of reconciliation. A nation defeated in the First World War was finding its way back into the community of nations — a brief item that even reached colonial Korean newspapers. In Washington, Calvin Coolidge occupied the presidency; in London, Stanley Baldwin led the government — details that filtered through in scattered wire reports.

Colonial Parallels

Germany’s path back to the international table via treaty and diplomacy had no equivalent for a colonized people. In 1926, India remained under the British Raj, its own path to self-rule still decades away; Ireland, having won partial independence in 1922, was still consolidating its fragile Free State; the Philippines remained under American administration, its promised independence still an unfulfilled pledge. Colonized Koreans reading of Germany’s readmission to Geneva that week had no treaty of their own to look forward to — only a courtroom, the next morning, where the outcome was already presumed.

Understanding Daily Life

Before dawn, peddlers arriving from the provinces filed through Namdaemun Station. By mid-morning, the churches of Jeong-dong and Angук-dong filled with worshippers. At midday, Jongno’s half-day shops emptied into the street, mingling with families out for a Sunday stroll. Toward dusk, children played in the alleys along the Cheonggyecheon stream while adults gathered to talk quietly of tomorrow’s trial, the long shadow of the rising Government-General building falling across Gwanghwamun. It was, on its surface, an ordinary Sunday — but beneath it lay the private weight each household carried: a parent’s worry for a son in prison, sympathy for the exhausted strikers of Mokpo, and quiet dread for the week about to begin.

Person of the Day: The Unnamed Students of Jongno

Among the roughly seventy Chungang School students and their teacher held since June for the June Tenth manse shouting, none are individually confirmed in the sources available to this paper as of this Sunday — their sentencing would not come until November 16, 1926, when several received one-year terms with a five-year suspension, later appealed. What is confirmed is the scale: dozens of teenagers, arrested for shouting three words in a public street, still waiting behind prison walls three months on. Their story, unlike Stresemann’s podium speech in Geneva, would not make the front page of a Western newspaper.

Century Mirror

A century ago, on this same Sunday, a defeated Germany found a treaty-paved road back onto the world stage. Colonized Korea had no such road. A hundred years later, the Republic of Korea sits at the center of that same stage — a UN member state, a member of the G20. Numbers that cannot be confirmed are left unfilled rather than invented.

One thing, however, is certain: the students who waited for trial and the workers who kept striking, on this quiet Sunday a century ago, are part of why today’s Korea stands where it does.

Tomorrow’s Preview

Tomorrow, Monday the 13th, the Gyeongseong District Court opens the Korean Communist Party trial. We’ll bring you what happens inside that courtroom. The Government-General building’s completion is now eighteen days away. Until then — 10:10 PM, KST. Good night.