100 Years Ago Today

As you wind down your day, step back a hundred years with us. On this Tuesday in 1926, colonial Gyeongseong (Seoul) sat under a high, clear autumn sky, while thousands of miles away in Geneva, the world was quietly redrawing its postwar order. Neither the diplomats in Switzerland nor the shopkeepers on Jongro street knew that this ordinary Tuesday would later matter — one for a treaty finally taking effect, the other for a case that simply refused to end.

Korea Under Colonial Rule

At the Gyeongseong District Court prosecutor’s office, familiar names surfaced yet again. Since the arrest of Kim Jae-bong and dozens of others in November of the previous year, the preliminary hearings (yeshim) into the so-called First Korean Communist Party Incident had dragged on for nearly ten months — with no trial date in sight. Colonial press censorship, enforced by the Government-General’s police bureau, meant most newspaper reports of the hearings ran with entire passages blacked out or simply omitted, leaving readers to guess at what had actually been said in the courtroom. Families of the detained reportedly struggled even to secure visitation. On the streets, people traded the same weary phrase: “Still no trial.” For those caught in it, the word “preliminary hearing” had come to mean an open-ended wait with no fixed end.

East Asia in Turmoil

Korea’s troubles were not isolated. Far to the south in Mokpo, workers at an oil-pressing plant were now more than eight months into a strike over wage increases and a shortened workday, from twelve hours down to ten. The company had brought in outside labor to keep production running, and the dispute had grown steadily more violent. Meanwhile, in front of Gwanghwamun in central Gyeongseong, the massive new Government-General building — a five-story granite structure meant to project imperial permanence — was in its final stretch of construction, just seventeen days from its planned dedication ceremony on October 1. A monument to colonial power was rising at the very moment its subjects’ patience, in a factory town far away, was wearing thin.

The World Stage

In Geneva, the day carried real historic weight. The Locarno Treaties — negotiated the previous October and formally signed in London that December — came into force on this date, as instruments of ratification were exchanged and the agreements were registered with the League of Nations. Coming just days after Germany’s admission as a permanent member of the League Council, with Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann addressing the Assembly, it marked the first real diplomatic reintegration of Germany into the European order since the First World War. Yet the peace being sealed in Switzerland had an uneasy counterpoint in Asia: on the Yangtze River, British, American, and French gunboats remained locked in a standoff with Chinese warlord forces near Wanhsien, weeks after Chinese troops had seized British steamers and fired on them.

Colonial Parallels

Colonial subjects elsewhere would have recognized Gyeongseong’s frustration instantly. In British India, indefinite pretrial detention under emergency ordinances was a routine tool against nationalist organizers. In Ireland, the newly independent Free State was still untangling itself from decades of similarly opaque colonial justice. What made the Korean case distinct was scale and duration: a ten-month preliminary hearing, conducted almost entirely behind a wall of censorship, for a case that would not reach a formal indictment decision until the following spring. Across empires, the tools differed in name — preliminary hearing, emergency detention, martial law — but their effect on ordinary families was strikingly similar: uncertainty stretched indefinitely.

Person of the Day

Kim Jae-bong, the first general secretary of the Korean Communist Party, had been in custody since November 1925. A journalist and organizer before his arrest, he had helped build the party’s early structure only to see it dismantled by mass arrests within months. By this date in September 1926, he had already spent nearly a year in pretrial detention, his case still without a courtroom date — a fate shared, in the historical record, by dozens of his co-defendants.

Understanding Daily Life

Ordinary Gyeongseong moved at its own rhythm regardless of courtrooms and treaties. Police made frequent rounds along Jongro street that morning; Tuesdays traditionally saw a steady stream of minor offenders through the summary court. By midday, the marquee outside Dansungsa theater in Jongro 3-ga was being prepared for the following month’s premiere of a new film by director Na Woon-gyu. At the nearby Umigwan theater, a bell rang out to announce the evening screening. Students browsed new titles outside bookshops, while in cafés, hushed conversations turned to the courthouse. As dusk settled, lamps came on one by one, and the street quieted — each person carrying home their own private share of worry.

Century Mirror

A hundred years on, the courtroom looks unrecognizable. Indefinite, censored pretrial detention of the kind Kim Jae-bong endured has no legal equivalent today — detention periods are codified, and trials are open to the public and the press. The theaters have changed just as much: where Dansungsa and Umigwan once rotated a handful of prints between them, today’s Seoul offers multiplex screens and on-demand streaming, a single evening’s choice once unimaginable to a 1926 moviegoer.

Tomorrow’s Preview

Tomorrow brings another ordinary day to colonial Gyeongseong — sixteen days now from the Government-General building’s dedication, and the Mokpo strike edging toward its ninth month. Join us tomorrow evening, 10:10 PM KST.