Korea Under Colonial Rule

Yun Sim-deok was born in Pyongyang in 1897, one of Korea’s first generation of women to receive a modern education abroad. She studied voice at the Tokyo Music School and returned to Korea in the early 1920s, debuting in 1923 as the country’s first trained soprano. Audiences were reportedly astonished by her voice. But ticket sales for Western classical recitals could not pay her bills, and — in a choice that scandalized as much as it impressed — she crossed over into popular song and film to survive financially, becoming one of colonial Korea’s first real celebrities in the modern, commercial sense.

On August 1, 1926, one day before the date of this report, Yun entered the Nitto Records studio in Osaka. Accompanied on piano by her sister, she recorded a song she had written herself: Korean lyrics set to “Waves of the Danube,” a waltz by the Romanian composer Ion Ivanovici. She titled it Hymn of Death.

By most accounts, also present that day was Kim U-jin, a playwright born in Jangseong and raised in the southwestern port city of Mokpo. A graduate of Waseda University’s English literature program, Kim was already recognized as a pioneering figure in Korea’s fledgling modern theater movement. He was, by all accounts, already married, with a wife and children in Mokpo.

What the two of them did on August 2 itself — the day this report covers — is not recorded in any source we could verify. We are not going to guess. What later accounts do establish is that two days later, on August 4, a ferry linking Shimonoseki, Japan, and Busan, Korea, carried them both across the Korea Strait — and that neither completed the crossing.

Elsewhere in the colony, the summer of 1926 carried a heavier undertone. In April, Sunjong, the last monarch of Korea’s Joseon dynasty, had died. His state funeral procession on June 10 became the occasion for the largest anti-colonial demonstration since the March 1st Movement of 1919 — remembered today as the June 10th Movement. More than a thousand people were eventually arrested, and the crackdown effectively dismantled the second incarnation of the Korean Communist Party. By August, trials of those detained were still working their way through colonial courts, and newspapers like Dong-A Ilbo and Chosun Ilbo continued running reports of arrests and hearings.

At the same time, the Government-General had just begun a new phase of its Rice Production Expansion Plan for 1926 — an ambitious multi-year program to increase irrigation, improve farming methods, and ship more Korean rice to Japan each year. A new Land Improvement Bureau had just been established inside the Oriental Development Company to administer it. For Korean tenant farmers already struggling — colonial statistics of the period put the destitute and poor at roughly 11 percent of the population — the plan promised more debt before it promised more rice. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, a group of Korean student activists had just joined the Leninist League, forming what became known as the ML faction — one more thread in the restless reorganization of Korea’s socialist and independence movements abroad that summer.

East Asia in Turmoil

Across the sea in China, the summer of 1926 belonged to the Northern Expedition. Chiang Kai-shek, commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, had launched a sweeping military campaign that July to unify China under Nationalist rule by defeating the country’s regional warlords one by one. By early August, his forces were pressing toward Wuhan in Hubei province. That month, Chiang personally proposed that the warlord Sun Chuanfang surrender and defect to the Nationalist cause; Sun refused, and fighting for control of the strategic Wuhan region continued.

Japan itself, Korea’s colonial ruler, was quietly nearing the end of the Taisho era, though no one in August 1926 could have known the emperor’s reign had only months left. The Government-General in Seoul continued implementing rice and land policy set in Tokyo — with a bureaucratic efficiency that colonial subjects and colonial administrators experienced very differently. Japanese-language papers published in Korea, like Keijo Nippo, the official organ of the colonial government, ran alongside Korean-language papers — two parallel press ecosystems reporting the same colony from opposite sides of the same occupation.

The World Stage

Farther west, 1926 was a year of endings and beginnings for several empires. In Morocco, the Rif War was winding down: Abd el-Krim, the Berber leader who had humiliated Spanish colonial forces for years, had surrendered to the French in May, and by August only scattered resistance remained in the Spanish protectorate zone.

In Spain itself, the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera nearly ended abruptly this month, when an assassination attempt against him failed in Barcelona — a knife thrown at his head from a passing car narrowly missed, and a 34-year-old Catalan anarchist was arrested.

And just across the Atlantic, tensions in Mexico were about to boil over. Tomorrow, August 3, peasants loyal to the Catholic Church would rise up against the anti-clerical policies of President Plutarco Elías Calles, marking the start of what became known as the Cristero War — a brutal, years-long conflict between the Mexican state and rural Catholic insurgents.

Colonial Parallels

Korea’s predicament in 1926 was not unique. Across the colonized world that summer, similar patterns of unrest and negotiation were playing out.

In British India, Indian National Congress activists were positioning themselves for provincial legislative council elections due before the year was out — a limited but closely watched exercise in self-government under British oversight, playing out in the shadow of Mahatma Gandhi’s continuing campaign of non-cooperation. Like Korea’s June 10th Movement, Indian nationalist agitation in this period mixed street demonstration with an emerging strategy of working the colonial system’s own institutions from within.

In Ireland, the Irish Free State — established just four years earlier out of a bloody civil war — was undergoing its own political realignment. Earlier in 1926, Éamon de Valera had split from Sinn Féin to found a new party, Fianna Fáil, betting that constitutional politics could achieve what the gun could not. The parallel to Korea’s own fractured independence movement, torn in 1926 between armed resistance, diplomacy, and socialist organizing, is difficult to miss.

In the Philippines, then an American colonial territory, tensions simmered between Filipino legislators pushing for accelerated “Filipinization” of the civil service and the American colonial administration, which resisted ceding administrative control. As in Korea, the colonizing power framed its rule as tutelage toward eventual self-government; as in Korea, the colonized increasingly disagreed with the timeline. What united these movements — in Seoul, Calcutta, Dublin, and Manila — was not coordination, but a shared historical moment: empires everywhere were discovering that the populations they governed had stopped waiting quietly.

Person of the Day: Yun Sim-deok

Tonight’s Person of the Day is Yun Sim-deok, born July 25, 1897, in Pyongyang. After graduating from a teacher’s college in Seoul, she briefly worked as an elementary school teacher in Wonju before securing a rare opportunity: study in Japan, where she trained in voice at the Tokyo Music School, graduating around 1923.

Returning to Korea, she made her debut as the country’s first Western-trained soprano, performing recitals that drew curious, sometimes skeptical crowds unused to a Korean woman commanding a concert stage in the European classical tradition. But recital tickets alone couldn’t support her, and by the mid-1920s she had begun performing popular songs and appearing in film — a pragmatic pivot that also made her one of colonial Korea’s first mass-media celebrities, for better and worse. Public fascination with her personal life, including her relationship with the married playwright Kim U-jin, followed her as closely as her music did.

On August 1, 1926, in an Osaka recording studio, she recorded Hymn of Death, singing Korean lyrics of her own composition over the melody of a Romanian waltz. It would become, after her death, the best-selling Korean record of its era — reportedly moving some 100,000 copies, a striking number for a colonial-era recording. It is often cited as the first true Korean popular song.

She never lived to see that success. Two days after this report — on August 4, 1926 — Yun Sim-deok and Kim U-jin disappeared from a ferry crossing the Korea Strait between Shimonoseki and Busan. Neither body was recovered. Whether their deaths were a suicide pact, an accident, or something else entirely has been debated by biographers and dramatists for a century. What is not in dispute is the date of the recording, the date of the disappearance, and the haunting two-day gap between them — a gap that includes today, August 2, 1926, a day about which history, frustratingly, has almost nothing to say.

Understanding Daily Life

For most residents of Gyeongseong — colonial-era Seoul — Monday, August 2, 1926, looked like any other summer workday. Newsboys hawked the morning editions of Dong-A Ilbo and Chosun Ilbo along Jongno street. Shops along Namdaemun-tong raised their shutters. By midday, students on summer break drifted through the cafes and secondhand bookshops of what is now the Chungmuro district, one of the city’s few spaces where a modern, Westernized youth culture was visibly taking shape under colonial rule.

Music moved through the city very differently than it does now. There was no radio broadcasting in Korea yet — that would not arrive until 1927 — so popular songs spread through phonograph records and gramophone shops. Hymn of Death had not yet reached Korean shores on this particular Monday; it would take several more weeks for the Osaka recording to be pressed, shipped, and sold in Korea. When it finally did arrive, it would spread through those same gramophone shops with unusual speed.

By evening, the plaza outside Gyeongseong Station filled with travelers headed toward Busan and, from there, onward to Japan by ferry — the same route that, two days later, would carry two of Korea’s brightest cultural figures to their deaths. On this particular evening, though, they were simply part of the crowd: nobody watching the station platform that Monday had any reason to notice them.

Century Mirror

In 1926, Yun Sim-deok could not support herself as a classical singer alone and had to reinvent herself, at real cost to her reputation, as a popular entertainer just to make a living. Female performers in colonial Korea operated under intense social scrutiny, with little institutional protection and few career models to follow.

A century later, the industry she was pushed into almost by necessity has become one of Korea’s most successful cultural exports. K-pop acts fill stadiums from Los Angeles to Paris to Jakarta; Korean popular music, once dismissed by cultural elites as low, disreputable entertainment unfit for a trained singer, is now studied, streamed, and celebrated worldwide.

Yun Sim-deok set Korean words to a Romanian waltz in an Osaka studio, never imagining that a century later, the world would be singing along to songs written in her native language.