Every August, as Korea marks Gwangbokjeol, National Liberation Day, familiar names return to television programs, ceremonies, museums, and history articles. Yu Gwan-sun, Kim Gu, Ahn Chang-ho, and other well-known independence activists deserve the place they hold in Korean memory.
But the Korean independence movement was much larger than the group of people most of us can name. There were nationalists, socialists, communists, anarchists, religious activists, students, journalists, workers, and armed fighters. There were also people who never became famous but provided money, shelter, information, food, printing facilities, or a safe place to sleep.
And there was another side of the story. Some Koreans cooperated with Japanese colonial rule, and some actively participated in policing, surveillance, arrests, and the repression of anti-colonial movements.
When I visited Seodaemun Prison History Hall with my family in 2015, one of the things that stayed with me was not a single famous name. It was a wall covered with faces. Looking at the photographs again eleven years later made me wonder: how many of the people who resisted colonial rule do we actually remember?
A Wall Filled With Faces
One photograph I took at Seodaemun Prison History Hall in 2015 shows an exhibition wall almost completely covered with portrait cards. From a distance, the individual faces become a large pattern. When you move closer, however, each photograph belongs to a particular person who once had a name, an address, a family, an occupation, and a life outside prison.
Many Japanese colonial-era records of this kind have survived. Today, the National Institute of Korean History makes thousands of them searchable through its Japanese Colonial Surveillance Target Cards database.
The database is officially called Ilje Gamsi Daesang Inmul Kadeu (일제감시대상인물카드), or cards of people targeted for surveillance by the Japanese colonial authorities. Depending on the record, a card can contain a photograph, date of birth, address, alleged offense, and information connected to arrest or imprisonment.
It is important not to describe everyone in this archive automatically as a decorated independence activist. The collection reflects the colonial authorities’ surveillance system and contains people monitored or punished for different reasons.
That distinction actually makes the archive more valuable. It allows us to look beyond a simplified list of national heroes and see something of the much wider system through which colonial authorities tried to identify, classify, monitor, and control people they considered dangerous.
Korea’s Independence Activists Did Not Share One Ideology
It is tempting to look backward at the colonial period through the political divisions that came later. But Korea in the 1920s and 1930s cannot be neatly divided into the political categories of present-day South Korea and North Korea.
The independence movement contained very different ideological currents. Nationalists disagreed among themselves about strategy and government. Socialists and communists often connected national liberation with class struggle, while anarchists opposed imperialism as well as coercive forms of state power.
Those differences were real. There is no reason to hide them or pretend that every independence activist wanted the same political system that South Korea has today. At the same time, disagreement about what Korea should become after liberation did not necessarily prevent people from working toward the immediate goal of ending Japanese colonial rule.
The 1926 June 10 Independence Movement is a useful example. In 2026, Korea marked its 100th anniversary. Socialist organizers, Cheondogyo figures, students, and other activists became involved through different networks, and the movement became an important example of cooperation across ideological lines.
One of its organizers was Kwon O-seol. Kwon was not simply someone who can be retrospectively described as vaguely “left-wing.” He was involved with the Korean Communist Party and the Korean Communist Youth Association. He helped organize the June 10 movement, was arrested by the Japanese authorities, received a prison sentence, and died in Seodaemun Prison in 1930 before completing his term.
The Republic of Korea posthumously awarded him the Order of Merit for National Foundation, Independence Medal, in 2005. His life does not become historically understandable by deleting the word “communist.” But neither does it become understandable if that single word is used to erase everything he did against Japanese colonial rule.
Why Colonial-Era Socialism Cannot Simply Be Called “North Korean”
This distinction is particularly important in Korea because the Korean War and decades of division gave words such as socialism and communism an entirely different political weight. Some socialist independence activists later went to North Korea or participated in communist governments. Others remained in the South, followed different political paths, were purged by other communists, or died long before Korea was divided into two states.
Kwon O-seol died in 1930. He never saw the establishment of North Korea in 1948. For that reason, describing every socialist independence activist of the colonial period as if he or she had supported the later North Korean dictatorship is historically misleading. The same problem occurs in the opposite direction if we romanticize them and ignore what they actually believed.
South Korea’s own system of national recognition reflects this complexity. According to the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs, recognition of independence activists from socialist backgrounds began in 1995 and was expanded in 2005. Kwon O-seol was among those awarded the Order of Merit for National Foundation, Independence Medal, in 2005.
This is also one reason I think the history of the Republic of Korea should not be read only backward from the Cold War. I discuss a related question in my article about why I see 1919 as the constitutional and historical beginning of the Republic of Korea.
The people who resisted Japanese rule did not yet know exactly how liberation, occupation, division, and war would unfold after 1945. We do. That difference matters when we judge the choices people made decades earlier.
Beyond Famous Leaders: The People Who Kept the Movement Alive
Independence movements cannot operate through famous leaders alone. Someone has to carry messages, print leaflets, collect money, hide people, provide food, arrange transportation, and sometimes simply keep quiet when the authorities ask questions. Many of these acts leave fewer traces than a battle or a major political declaration.
Some supporting figures did leave enough evidence for their stories to survive. Lee Seung-ho, for example, supported fundraising efforts connected with the Korean Provisional Government and provided substantial sums of money to independence activists. He was not commanding an army, but money was essential for maintaining organizations, transporting people, publishing material, and purchasing supplies.
Park Mun-hak provides another example of what support could mean. While working as a clerk at a financial cooperative in Pyongyang, he was involved with Gwanghandan and allowed members of its armed unit to use his staff quarters as a hiding place and contact base. When Japanese colonial police raided the quarters, he was killed in the ensuing confrontation.
These people were not all passive helpers standing outside the independence movement. Some became active members themselves. The larger point is that resistance required a network far wider than the small number of leaders whose names later entered school textbooks.
There must also have been many smaller acts that left little or no individual record: a meal given to someone passing through, a room offered for a night, money quietly contributed, information delivered to the right person, or a warning that the police were coming.
We should be careful not to invent heroic stories for people whose records do not exist. But surviving documents make it clear that armed groups and underground organizations depended on local communities and support networks.
That is why I hesitate to describe Korean independence as the achievement of a few extraordinary heroes. Famous activists mattered enormously, but movements survive because many less visible people also decide to help.
Not Every Korean Resisted Colonial Rule
There is an uncomfortable counterpart to that story. Not every Korean resisted Japanese colonial rule. Some worked within the colonial administration, and some actively assisted the police and other institutions that monitored and suppressed anti-Japanese activity.
This subject also requires care. Simply having held an ordinary job during the colonial period does not automatically make someone a major pro-Japanese collaborator, and the degree of responsibility varied greatly from person to person. There were, however, cases in which the evidence of active repression is very clear.
Noh Deok-sul, for example, served as a colonial police officer and became notorious for arresting and torturing people involved in anti-Japanese and social movements. After liberation, his colonial record became part of the controversy surrounding Korea’s incomplete effort to investigate and punish collaboration.
I look more closely at that difficult post-liberation issue in my separate article on pro-Japanese collaborators in Korea and why the subject remains controversial.
Mentioning collaborators does not mean placing them morally on the same level as the people they persecuted. Japan created and maintained colonial rule over Korea, and Koreans who actively helped enforce that rule made their own choices within that system.
What interests me is the contrast. One Korean might risk his life by hiding an independence activist. Another might become the police officer searching for him. Looking at both makes the choices made by people during the colonial period more visible, not less.
Arrest Did Not Mean Simply Waiting for a Trial
Historical biographies often compress terrible experiences into a few words:
“Arrested.” “Interrogated.” “Sentenced to five years.” “Imprisoned at Seodaemun.” The words are brief. The experience was not.
Accounts left by independence activists and political prisoners describe severe beatings and numerous forms of torture during interrogation by Japanese colonial police. Records include suspension by the limbs, water torture, electric torture, and sexualized violence, as investigators attempted to obtain confessions and information about organizations and other activists.
Not all of that violence took place inside Seodaemun Prison itself. Much of the torture associated with independence cases occurred during police interrogation before trial, an important distinction when describing the history accurately.
During my 2015 visit, the museum included reconstructed displays showing interrogation and torture methods used during the colonial period.
I do not think there is much value in turning every torture method into a long, graphic list. The important point is what arrest could mean for a person suspected of underground activity. It could mean being pressured to name colleagues and reveal safe houses while suffering physical and psychological violence. After conviction came imprisonment, forced labor, poor conditions, illness, and in some cases death. The simple phrase “served time in prison” can hide all of that.
Walking Through Seodaemun Prison Eleven Years Later
Seodaemun Prison opened in 1908 under the name Gyeongseong Prison. It later became Seodaemun Prison and continued functioning under different names after liberation until the detention center moved in 1987. Part of the complex was preserved and eventually opened as Seodaemun Prison History Hall.
Another photograph from my 2015 visit shows an old cell door marked No. 18.
In a photograph it can look like an interesting old object. Walking through the actual cell blocks feels different. The doors, narrow openings, central surveillance structure, and rows of cells make it easier to understand that this was not an abstract historical symbol but a place where real people were confined.
If I visited again today, I would begin with the main exhibition building to understand the history of the prison before entering the surviving cell blocks. The central building and Cells 10, 11, and 12 show the architecture of surveillance and confinement, while the workshop area explains prison labor.
I would then continue to the execution site, the corpse-exit passage, the exercise area with partition walls, and the women’s prison building. The women’s ward is particularly important because the story of anti-colonial resistance is sometimes remembered through male political leaders even though many women were also arrested and imprisoned.
I would allow at least an hour for a visit, and longer if you want to read the exhibitions carefully. The museum is near Exit 5 of Dongnimmun Station on Seoul Subway Line 3. It generally opens from 9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. from March through October and until 5:00 p.m. from November through February, with regular Monday closures. Because exhibitions and operating details can change, I recommend checking the official Seodaemun Prison History Hall visitor information before visiting.
In 2026, Seodaemun Prison also presented new and revised exhibitions connected with the 81st anniversary of liberation, including a cooperative exhibition in Cell Block 10. The exhibitions will continue to change, which is another reason I describe my three photographs specifically as records of my 2015 visit rather than pictures of what visitors will necessarily see today.
Remembering Independence Without Making the Past Simpler Than It Was
Looking again at the wall of faces in my old photograph, I do not think the lesson is that we need to memorize thousands more names. It is something slightly different.
Korea’s independence activists did not all share the same ideology. We do not have to agree today with every political idea held by a nationalist, socialist, communist, or anarchist who fought Japanese colonial rule. But political disagreement does not require us to erase what a person actually did.
A socialist who organized resistance against Japanese colonial rule was a socialist and an independence activist. An anarchist who opposed Japanese imperialism was an anarchist and an independence activist. Their later lives, when there were later lives to examine, should also be judged from the evidence rather than assumed in advance. The same historical honesty should apply to everyone else.
Some people whose names barely survived helped provide money, rooms, food, information, printing, and transportation. Some people refused to cooperate. Some took enormous risks. Others chose to cooperate with colonial power and, in certain cases, helped identify, arrest, interrogate, and suppress those resisting it.
History becomes less comfortable when all of those people appear in the same picture, but it also becomes more human.
When I visited Seodaemun Prison in 2015, I probably knew the names of only a tiny fraction of the faces on that wall. Eleven years later, that photograph means more to me precisely because I still do not know most of them.
For me, remembering Korea’s independence movement should not mean reducing it to a few heroes, one ideology, or the political divisions that came after liberation. It means trying to see the people who lived before the ending of the story was known — and looking carefully at the choices they made.
Sometimes I ask myself an uncomfortable question: if I had lived in that period, what kind of person would I have been? Would I have had the courage to become an independence activist? Would I have cooperated with colonial power? Or would I simply have tried to keep my head down and protect myself and my family?
I cannot answer with confidence. I would like to believe that I could have learned from the courage of those who risked their freedom and their lives for independence. But I do not know whether I could have overcome the fear of arrest, torture, or death. I would also like to believe that I would never have chosen comfort or safety at the cost of harming my neighbors and fellow Koreans. Yet from the safety of the present, I cannot know exactly how fear and pressure would have shaped me.
That is perhaps the question I am left with whenever I think about this period: who would I have been if I had lived then?
About the Author 🇰🇷
I live in South Korea and write about the small details of Korean life and culture that I experience and observe firsthand.
English is my second language, so I sometimes use tools such as Gemini and Google Translate to help with translation and editing. The experiences, observations, opinions, and cultural perspectives in my articles are my own, and I personally review and edit every article before publishing it.
My goal with Korea Core Info is simple: to share everyday Korea from a local perspective and help international readers discover things they might not always find in a typical travel guide.
I hope my stories and guides help you understand Korea a little better — not just as a place to visit, but as a place where people live their everyday lives.