On anniversary of this death, students learn the lessons of Ahn Jung-geun

Instructors from Korea and Japan work to ensure that the younger generation learns independence activist’s history

“Ahn Jung-geun, who advocated peace in East Asia, didn’t mean to assassinate a single individual - he was taking aim at imperialism itself.”

The 11th South Korea-Japan joint peace class was held on Mar. 26 at the library at Keunyoung Middle School in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province. The class, attended by students from the second class of the third grade, was co-taught by Michiko Nishimura, 60, an adjunct professor at the graduate school of Chuo University, and Cho Eun-kyung, 47, a teacher at Keunyoung Middle School.

Mar. 26, 1910 - 105 years ago - was the day that Ahn Jung-geun was executed in the prison in Lushun, China. Every year since 2005, Cho has been holding a joint class to mark the day of his death. She planned the joint classes in concert with Japanese educators that she met at a historical symposium in Tokyo, Japan, in 2003.

Cho’s co-teacher for the first 10 classes - Hitoshi Tsujuki, former teacher at Yokohama Middle School in Japan - was unable to participate because of an event he was invited to at the Ahn Jung Geun Memorial Museum in Seoul on the same day. In his place was Nishimura, who is greatly interested in Ahn’s ideas about peace in East Asia.

“When I visited the Ahn Jung Geun Memorial Museum in Seoul 20 years ago, I was moved by the ideas in Ahn’s essay about peace in East Asia, including a deliberative peace body between Korea, China, and Japan and a joint bank and shared currency,” Nishimura said.

“These days, there is tension between South Korea, China, and Japan. Ahn Jung-geun was a pioneer who advocated peace in Northeast Asia 105 years ago. That was even before the European Union.”

The class on Thursday covered the poet Yun Dong-ju, who studied at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Nishimura’s alma mater; Sohn Kee-chung, the Olympic-gold winning marathon runner who was close to Norito Yamamoto, Nishimura’s teacher; and the question of the comfort women. The students watched videos about these subjects, and there was a reading of Yun Dong-ju’s poem “Prologue”

A survey of 215 students that was conducted about the joint class showed that it had had a positive effect.

“91.5% of the students who took the joint class had a solid historical perspective and a good understanding of Ahn’s life, compared to 83.5% of the students who did not take the class,” Cho said.

“This was an opportunity to learn more about Ahn, who gave his life for Korean independence,” said Choi Woo-jin, a boy in the class.

“I had only heard about Japanese with unreasonable positions about the comfort women issue, but now I’ve learned that there are conscientious Japanese activists, too,” said Baek Ju-hee, a girl who took the class.

“Telling the students about the history of the Japanese occupation once is better than nothing, but if they hear it two or three times they will remember it. The reason I have been doing this joint class for 10 years is because of my sense of mission that someone has to keep reminding them about it,” Cho said.

　

By Park Im-keum, North Jeolla correspondent

　

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