[KS] Official end of WWII in Asia

[dmccann at fas.harvard.edu]

With regard to the nonviolent nature of the demonstrations, it might be
remembered that it was Manhae, Han Youngun, the Buddhist leader, poet and also
participant in pre-1910 resistance, who wrote the three codicils to the March 1
Declaration calling for nonviolence.

He was jailed for participating, as were a number of the other 32.

There is a very small park across the back alley from Chogye Temple, where the
copies of the Declaration were printed the night before.

Note also in this connection Todd Henry's chapter on "Respatializing Chosôn's
Royal Capital, The Politics of Japanese Urban REforms in Early Colonia Korean
1905-1919," in Tangherlini and Yea, Sitings.  Critical Approaches to Korean
Geography.  Henry notes that it was down the thoroughfares the Japanese
Government-General had reconstructed, and from one significant public space--
Pagoda Park-- to another-- the Taehan Mun-- that the demonstrators moved,
giving their own meaning to those spaces.

In my sense of it, they were text-messaging.  The system required news coverage
to complete the links, rather than massive radio towers, which is why that line
of communication was blocked by Japanese press censorship.

A chillingly deliberate repeat of that message-blocking occurred in 1980, when
the ROK government cut communication lines to Kwangju prior to the military
entry into the city and violent suppression of the demonstrations there.

David McCann