Photos of 3-1 at the Independence Hall of Korea

The 105th anniversary of Korea's uprising against Japanese colonialism.

Koreans honored the 105th anniversary of the 1919 protests against Japan’s occupation on March 1st. Japan invaded Korea and made it a protectorate in 1905 then annexed all of Korea in 1910. During its four decades of rule, Japan would ban Korean language education, encourage Koreans to move to Japan where they would work dangerous and often uncompensated jobs, including coal mining, treat Koreans as second-class citizens, and arrest and torture any who challenged Japanese rule.

Koreans began resisting Japan’s colonization before 1919—An Jung-geun assassinated colonial governor Ito Hirobumi at Harbin Station in 1909—but pro-independence activities escalated in 1919. Believing in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s language extolling the virtue of self-determination, Korea sent an unofficial delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. Their delegation and its demands went ignored—as did those of representatives of other colonized countries like Ho Chi Minh. Some of those documents from Korean activists and their sympathizers pushing for recognition of Korean sovereignty are on display at the Independence Hall of Korea in Cheonan (3·1운동 직후 국제회의서 한국 독립 외친 원본 자료 공개).

While Korea’s attempts to have its independence recognized went unheeded, the Korean people did not give up the fight. They wrote their own Declaration of Independence, which they read at Tapgol Park on March 1, 1919. Japan cracked down brutally, killing between 553 (Japanese records) and 7,509 (per Korean historian and provisional government president Park Eun-sik) as protests spread across the country over the ensuing months, attracting over 2,000,000 freedom-hungry Koreans.

On March 1, soldiers and flag guards marched at the Independence Hall, a monument and museum to the independence activists, which is located in Cheonan, Chungcheongnam-do, because it is nearby the birthplaces of martyr Yu Gwan-sun and provisional president Yi Dongnyeong.

South Korea’s Independence Hall still has a monument to the dream of unifying the Korean Peninsula, where the Unification Bell is housed. North Korea has destroyed its unification monument.

The Daegaksa Temple in Seoul (near Anguk) has a painting above its gate depicting the Korean people standing against the Japanese military police.