The Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street. Still standing, still booking shows.If you meet a Korean man old enough to have gone to school before 1945, and the conversation runs long enough, he will find a way to let you know that his Japanese is fluent.
He will not announce it. It arrives sideways. A phrase he doesn’t translate. A remark about a Japanese newspaper he can still read without effort. A small, careful pride, offered to you like something he isn’t supposed to have.
He learned it because Korean was taken out of his classroom. That was the point of the classroom.
I have never understood the sentiment. I have watched it my whole life and I still don’t.
The word for it
Korean has a term for the things the occupation left behind: 식민잔재 — colonial residue. It gets used in ordinary public argument, about street names and school songs and legal vocabulary that is still, if you look at it closely, Japanese.
It is a merciful word, and I think deliberately so. It puts the blame on the residue rather than on the person carrying it. The old man is not a collaborator. He was seven years old and someone took his language away and gave him another one, and he got very good at the one he was given, because being good at things is what a child does with what he’s handed.
Then he lived another eighty years carrying it around.
They took the names
Here is the part of Japanese colonial policy I would ask you to sit with, because it needs no historical background at all.
In 1939 the colonial government issued the order known as 창씨개명. Korean families were to abandon their family names and adopt Japanese ones. There was a deadline. Those who did not comply found that their children could not enroll in school, that they could not be issued documents, that the ordinary machinery of living stopped working for them.
Korean family names are not decorative. They are the organizing fact of a Korean family — the clan, the burial ground, the register that goes back centuries and names your people. The name is carved on the grave.
Imagine being told your name is now illegal. Imagine choosing a new one, under a deadline, in a language that isn’t yours, and then teaching it to your children.
I have found that people who cannot picture an occupation can picture that immediately. Everyone has a name.
I know, vaguely, that my father went through this. He was born in 1938, which made him two years old during the registration window — old enough to be entered in the register, far too young to have any say in what went there.
I have never heard the name. In his whole life he never once said it out loud to me.
He knew what it was.
No, it was not just what empires did
The most common way this gets waved off is that all empires were brutal and Japan was no worse than the rest. There is a clean way to test that, and it is Taiwan.
Japan took Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910. Same empire, overlapping decades, two colonies.
Taiwan received a name-change system in 1940 that was voluntary and permission-based — households had to apply, and most never did. Korea’s, issued a year earlier, was compulsory and enforced through the schools.
Same government. Same era. Two completely different policies.
The reason is not mysterious, and it isn’t a nationalist reading — it’s the standard one. Taiwan was an island acquisition, run as a showcase. Korea was the land bridge to Manchuria and to the continental empire Japan actually wanted. A showcase can be administered. A bridge has to be held. So Korea got 무단통치, the military rule of 1910 to 1919; then the March First uprising; then, by the late 1930s, the full assimilation program — the names, the shrines, the language, the conscription.
Thirty-five years, and why that was enough
People sometimes ask why the damage is so visible when Korea was occupied for a few decades, while Latin America was colonized for centuries.
The answer is that it wasn’t duration. It was compression.
Japan colonized Korea at the height of the industrial state, with everything that came with it: universal schooling, modern census and registry, conscription, a national police, mass print. Sixteenth-century Spain could not reach every child in the Andes. Twentieth-century Japan could reach every child in Korea, five days a week, in a classroom, and tell that child what his name was and which language he was permitted to think in.
Thirty-five years of that does what three hundred years of a slower empire does. The calendar is the wrong instrument.
Which is how you end up with a ninety-year-old man in Seoul who is quietly proud of his Japanese.
What was happening on West 43rd Street
Here is the part that surprised me, and the reason I am writing this in New York.
On March 2, 1921, roughly 1,300 people filled The Town Hall on West 43rd Street for a rally marking the March First independence movement. About a hundred of them were Korean immigrants. The rest were Americans who had come to listen. 서재필 — Philip Jaisohn, the first Korean to become a naturalized American citizen — spoke.
Town Hall is still there. It is two blocks from Times Square. It still books concerts. You can walk past the door tonight.
New York was not a footnote to the independence movement. It was a working front of it. 신한회 was organized here by eighteen Korean men to do the diplomatic work. The 대한인국민회 had a New York chapter, as did 흥사단 and 동지회. 근화회, a women’s independence organization, operated out of this city. So did the New York branch of the Korean Commission that 이승만 ran out of Washington.
They published, too, with almost no money: 삼일신보, 자유한국, 서재필’s monthly 대한평론, and The Korea Student Bulletin in English, for Americans. 뉴욕한인교회 was founded in the same period and has now passed its hundredth year.
Consider what that took. You are a few hundred immigrants in a city that has no idea where your country is, which has recently ceased to exist as a legal entity. You rent a hall on 43rd Street. You persuade thirteen hundred strangers to come and sit down. You put out a newspaper.
None of it liberated Korea. Liberation, when it came on August 15, 1945, came because Japan lost a war to somebody else.
They did it anyway, for twenty-four more years, not knowing that.
What I still don’t understand
That is what makes the old men so hard for me.
The people at Town Hall in 1921 and the boy in the classroom in 1941 were the same nation, in the same decades, split by an ocean and by luck. One group spent its life insisting the country existed. The other was raised, on purpose, to forget it — and then handed the fluency as a consolation prize and told it was an education.
He is proud of it because it is the only thing he got out of the arrangement. He is proud of it because being good at something is one of the few things a person can own. He is proud of it because at seven years old, being praised for your Japanese was how you were safe.
I understand all of that. I can write it down. I still don’t understand it in the place where understanding actually happens, and I don’t expect to, and I’ve stopped expecting to.
August 15 is the day Korea got its name back. Some people never quite got theirs.
If you’ve walked past Town Hall, you’ve walked past this. What’s the piece of your own family’s history you found out late, from someone who almost didn’t tell you? I’d like to hear it in the comments.
And if you want more of these, subscribe.
Gwangbokjeol, Korean independence movement New York, Town Hall 43rd Street, Seo Jae-pil, Philip Jaisohn, Soshi-kaimei, Korean colonial history, August 15 1945, Geunhwahoe, Sinhanhoe, miguktv
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