[100 Years Ago Today] August 11, 1926 – Judge at Center of Park Yeol "Mystery Photo" Scandal Steps Down

Korea Under Colonial Rule

The presiding preliminary judge in the case of Park Yeol and Kaneko Fumiko had submitted his resignation on August 9. On this day, August 11, that resignation was formally accepted. The affair had begun over a year earlier, in May 1925, when a photograph was taken inside a preliminary examination room in Tokyo: Park Yeol, a Korean anarchist from Mungyeong, and Kaneko Fumiko, his Japanese wife and fellow anarchist, seated pressed closely together.

That photograph, together with an anonymous pamphlet attacking the judiciary, surfaced in the press the previous month. Dong-a Ilbo’s August 1 dispatch from Tokyo ran under headlines reading “The Mysterious Document Concerning Park Yeol and Fumiko” and “Metropolitan Police Secretly Investigate Photo and Document Tied to Park Yeol and Fumiko.” The opposition parties, Seiyukai and Seiyuhonto, seized on the photograph as evidence of a “lack of national dignity” and attacked Justice Minister Egi Tasuku. The ruling Kenseikai cabinet was cornered. The Diet suspended its sessions for three full days.

Kaneko Fumiko did not live to see the resignation. On July 23, at the height of the scandal, she died in Utsunomiya Prison at the age of twenty-three. The cause was officially ruled suicide, but Korean newspapers withheld judgment. In Seoul’s legal circles, the judge’s resignation was read as one knot tied off in a long, dark summer — not an ending.

East Asia in Turmoil

To the south, in Guangzhou, Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army had set out the previous month on the Northern Expedition, pushing into Hunan and Hubei against the forces of warlord Wu Peifu. The campaign to reunify a fractured China was gathering speed even as Seoul absorbed news of the Tokyo scandal.

In Shanghai, the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea’s exile organ, the Dongnip Sinmun (Independence Newspaper), was still in print — into its seventh year of publication, a voice for Korean independence that colonial censors could not reach.

The World Stage

On this same day, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Greece jointly delivered a diplomatic note to Bulgaria, demanding an immediate halt to cross-border raids by armed Macedonian irregulars. Eight years after the guns of the Great War fell silent, the Balkans had still found no quiet.

Colonial Parallels

A colonial subject’s private life becoming a lever in the colonizer’s own parliamentary politics was not unique to Korea. In British India, the same years saw Congress leaders’ imprisonments turned into ammunition for debates in Westminster; in occupied Ireland only a few years earlier, the treatment of republican prisoners had likewise become fuel for scandal in London. Empires, it turned out, could be embarrassed by the bodies of the people they ruled — even when they controlled the courts, the press, and the prisons.

Person of the Day

Kaneko Fumiko was twenty-three when she died, a Japanese anarchist who had chosen to stand trial beside a Korean man rather than disown him, and who in 2018 — ninety-two years later — would be posthumously recognized by South Korea for her role in the independence movement. On August 11, 1926, in Seoul, her name was still spoken in the present tense, as if the outcome of the case that bore her name were still undecided.

Understanding Daily Life

With schools on summer recess, Seoul’s streets were, if anything, busier with young people, not less. Handbills for summer lecture courses went up on alley walls, and the YMCA hall filled every evening. At the bookstalls, students crowded around freshly arrived magazines from Tokyo. The exact temperature and rice price for this particular day were not confirmed in the sources consulted, though the lingering late-summer heat of early August appears to have continued largely unchanged.