The great leader Comrade
"On October 26, 1909 Ito Hirobumi, with a view to facilitating Japan's complete occupation of Korea, arrived at Harbin Railway Station to have a talk with tsarist Russia that was defeated in Russo-Japanese War. There he was shot to death by patriotic martyr An Jung Gun."
It was 9:30 in the morning on October 26, 1909 when a ceremony was held in Harbin Railway Station to welcome Ito Hirobumi, the then President of the Japanese Privy Council. The station was stirred: a Russian military band played the military music, firecrackers were shot here and there, and cheers rose among the welcoming crowd. The old Japanese came down the steps of the train to inspect the guard of honor of Russian army. He approached Japanese residents with a complacent smile as if he was satisfied. Suddenly his face was hardened when he saw a man aiming a pistol at him. The pistol fired. Three bullets were fired by the youth less than four or five meters away from Ito. Ito fell on his face like a rotten stump.
That youth was thirty-year-old Korean whose name was An Jung Gun. He checked if Ito fell down and fired at only shorty Japanese with the remaining bullets. The Minister of the Imperial Household, the Confidential Secretary Moriyas Jiro, the Japanese Consul General in Harbin and the Governor of Manchurian Railroad Company who had guided Ito all along from the port of Dalian down to Harbin, and other Japanese tumbled down shedding blood in turn. The station suddenly turned into a chaos with the crowds scattering about and screaming out at the sound of gunfire.
Conscious now of a wild upswing of elation, the Korean youth An Jung Gun did not want to escape in the least, standing in his place in tact. He suddenly exclaimed in elation "Long live independence of Korea!" for three times at the top of his voice. There were a lot of Russian crowds around, so he even yelled "Kareya Hurrah!" in Russian.
It was then that the Russian soldiers were brought to their senses to rush upon him. The man stretched out his hands gently to let them bind him without any embarrassment on his face.
Meanwhile, Ito was moved back into the train compartment for the first aid, but death stared him in the face every moment. The first bullet had gone through the middle of the right upper arm of Ito and slipped between the ribs to be embedded in the left lung, the second bullet cut through the right elbow joint deep into the costa, tearing open the thoraco-abdominal cavity before it lodged under the left rib, and the third bullet gone into the right rib to stab the abdomen before it was driven into the left rectus. Any one of them was enough to cut off his windpipe. Bandage binding up the wounds was soaked with blood in an instant.
Ito barely opened his mouth and asked who shot him. Hearing that it was a young Korean, Ito murmured "I have no hope now," and, his face turning pale suddenly, closed his eyes with a thin groan and never opened them again. It was about 30 minutes after he was shot.
At 10 o'clock on October 26, 1909, sixty-eight-year-old Ito Hirobumi, one of the very chieftains of Japanese colonialism in Korea breathed his last breath in a foreign soil. Ito's last complaint "I have no hope now" meant he was seized with a sense of guilt that he would never be pardoned for the crimes committed against Korean nation as a Korean saying goes like "After pleasure comes sorrow."
It was a patriotic act of revenge on the Japanese imperialism that An Jung Gun shot to death Ito Hirobumi, the mastermind of Japanese colonialism in Korea. He was born in Haeju, Korea and cherished a strong patriotism, high hatred for Japanese colonialism, and a strong determination to readily devote his life to save the destiny of Korea. When he was arrested at the site, a dagger was found in his clothes. When he was asked at the interrogation: "Did you intend to commit suicide at the site if you succeed?" he replied: "I have no intention to die yet, because Ito's death alone would not bring about independence to Korea and peace to the Eastern nations."
This incident eventually led to the Japanese enforcement of "sabre rule" in Korea, triggering a whirlwind of arrests of a great number of Koreans including hundreds of leading anti-Japanese figures at home and abroad.
On November 3, 1909, the patriot An Jung Gun was imprisoned in Room No. 9 of the 3rd Tower, Lushun Prison, Dalian. He inscribed the word "Perseverance" on the prison wall and endured the indescribable treatment of Japanese executioners.
Claiming himself to be the Chief of Staff of the Righteous Volunteers' Army of Korea, he asserted that he had disposed of Ito not as an assassin but as a military officer, and filed a 15-item bill of indictment against Ito Hirobumi in the court.
He was sentenced to death at the Japanese "trial" which was held for five times until February 12, 1910. He nevertheless turned the court into a place of condemning the Japanese colonial rule in Korea. His voice was calm when he said: "If they kill a Korean, ten Koreans will rise up against Japan, if they kill ten, one hundred Koreans will rise up, and if they kill one hundred, one thousand Koreans will rise up. … we will fight further hundred times if we fail this year, we will fight even a century if we fail next year, and we will fight even down to our grandchildren's generation if we fail in our children's generation until we could bring independence to our country. As long as all of the twenty million Korean people were not killed, Korea will never be deprived. … The very last Korean, if ever, will surely save his country. That is the spirit of Korean nation!"
Death was hovering over him. But for ninety-two days in prison cell with a calm mind, the martyr-to-be wrote his memoirs History of An Ung Chil (his childhood name was Ung Chil) and On Eastern Peace that denounced Japanese imperialism as a regional peace breaker.
As an elegant calligrapher, he left to posterity many excellent pieces of work-powerful yet soft, harmonious but majestic. Some of the noted pieces of his calligraphic work were: Winter only knows green pine tree; A man may die, yet his mind will be like steel, and a righteous person's mind is like a cloud in the face of danger; Peace is deplorable if it does not come and colonialism is disgraceful if it is not abandoned. His left palmate print was affixed to his brushwork along with the place, time and author. That palm seal was not full as the last knuckle of his ring finger had already cut off in January 1909 to write in blood a petition for Korean independence. The conspicuous imprint proved his authorship.
The Japanese government decided to carry out the sentence of death on him on the same date and at the same time, five months later, as Ito had been eliminated. "The convicted" could not help bursting into a laughter at the narrow-minded Japanese as he heard about it.
On March 24, 1910, he met his brothers who came to see him for the last time from Nampho. "A man is doomed to die once, so, I fear nothing. After I am killed, bury my bones near the Harbin Park, and take them home for burial if our national sovereignty is restored. Even though I went to the Heaven, I would also strive for the restoration of Korea. You go back and tell everyone of Korean compatriots that he or she should be responsible for Korea, fulfill his or her duty as a Korean, share the heart and pool the strength to render distinguished service to our nation to accomplish the purpose. If the cheers of hurrah for Korea's independence were heard in the Heaven, I would naturally dance and shout hurrah," he told his bothers. Looking at his brothers sobbing bitterly, he suddenly bit his hand to write Jeil Kangsan (meaning "a land of the most beautiful rivers and mountains in the world") with the blood dripping from that hand on the white silk they brought.
At 10 o'clock on March 26, 1910, An Jung Gun went out to the place of execution in a traditional white Korean attire. He cried quietly "Long live independence of Korea!" and recited his own poem looking up to the sky:
"Though a man may die,
His iron-will will never change.
Though the righteous man goes to the execution site,
The spirit of patriotism will never be abandoned."
The thirty-one-year-old martyr went up to the scaffold. (When Korea was finally liberated, a field investigation team took pains to unearth the remains of the martyr, but his mortal remains was not exhumed in the long run because it had been secretly disposed of by Japanese executioners.)
The Korean and Chinese people highly praised An Jung Gun as the "Martyr in the East". Ryu Rin Sok, chairman of the heads of the Righteous Volunteers' Army units, wrote his article titled "An Appeal to all the nations of the World", where he praised An Jung Gun as being peerless for all ages and in all places" and expressed his idea that everyone of the twenty million Koreans is the same as An Jung Gun and therefore the day would be sure to come when Japanese colonialism would be defeated and victory would be taken over them. Kim Thaek Yong, a poet that exiled himself in China and propagated the spirit of Korea by writing his noted compositions, wrote the poem "On Hearing the News that An Jung Gun, one of the Heads of the Righteous Volunteers' Army, Avenged the Enemy of Korea" and expressed his passion by speaking out that he "mercilessly shot to death the enemy of Korea as if he speared a lamb to death." He wrote the book "Biography of An Jung Gun" to distribute more than ten thousand copies over the whole China. Pak Un Sik, who formed the twin master researchers of study of Korean modern history with Sin Chae Ho, compiled "Biography of An Jung Gun" in 1914.
Liang Qi-chao (1873-1929), one of the Chinese bourgeois enlightenment activists, wrote his poem Autumn Wind cuts Bine (1909) that praised An Jung Gun's heroic deed as the grand act that removed the "cancer of the Eastern peace", saying "the sound of gunfire in Harbin shakes the world." Even Yuan Shi-kai, who became the lord of the northern military cliques and later became so-called "President", composed a poem in praise of heroic deed of martyr An Jung Gun.
It was the common feelings of Chinese people at that time that a Korean avenged the Chinese people upon their enemy. An Jung Gun's shooting of Ito Hirobumi made him a legendary hero among the Chinese people. Everyone knew An Jung Gun in Manchuria, and some of them even proposed to build a bronze statue of the martyr at Harbin Railway Station. In the early 2014, nearly 105 years after he had disposed of Ito Hirobumi, a Memorial Hall of Martyr An Jung Gun was built at the Harbin Railway Station, Heilungjiang Province, China.
Although he defied death in fighting against the Japanese colonialism, An Jung Gun did not fulfil the intention of restoration of national sovereignty because of the limitation of the times when he could not be guided by an outstanding leader. The independence of the country cannot be achieved by killing some of the enemies.
The life of the martyr who was full of ardent love for his motherland and the burning hatred for the enemy, however, remains in the memory of all.
As early as in the latter half of the 1920's when he was conducting revolutionary activities in Jilin, President
In the winter vacation in 1927, the great leader formed and guided an art propaganda troupe to perform drama An Jung Gun Shoots Ito Hirobumi and other revolutionary dramas in farming villages in Wusong and the surrounding countryside in Jilin. Although An Jung Gun was determined to die for his nation by shooting Ito Hirobumi to death, Korea was not restored and the Japanese rule got worse day by day. The revolutionary drama An Jung Gun Shoots Ito Hirobumi emphasized the idea that the national independence and emancipation of the oppressed masses can only be achieved by the united strength of the popular masses under the leadership of a political leader, not by the method of individual terrorism.
President
In the 1970's, Chairman
President
The DPRK's geopolitical position still remains unchanged, but the weak state of the past days when it was trampled upon as a stage of power struggle by big powers has now turned into a full-fledged political and military power looking down at the rest of the world thanks to the great leaders spanning from generation to generation.
