What Yun Ch'i-ho Knew: U.S.-Japan Relations and Imperial Race Making in Korea and the American South, 1904–1919

Abstract

On March 1, 1919, thousands of Koreans staged a public demonstration in Seoul to draw the attention of Woodrow Wilson. During the previous year, while World War I was still in progress, the American president had openly declared that all people in the aftermath of the war should be “dominated and governed only by their own consent,” by the principle of “self-determination.” When Wilson had appeared in January 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference to reconfigure the postwar world, the demonstrating Koreans, who had been living as colonial subjects of the Japanese Empire for many years, attempted to seize the opportunity and articulate their anticolonial aspirations in the same recognizable language. They championed the principle of self-determination aloud, hoping that Wilson would deliver them from Japanese rule.1 A fifty-four-year-old Korean named Yun Ch'i-ho warned that Wilson would not do so. Wilson's intended audience, he explained, were “those affected by the Great War, and Korea and other nations unaffected by the war [did] not have a reason to self-determine.” Even if the case of Korea received attention in Paris, Yun contended in an interview with the colonial government's official Japanese-language organ, Keijō Nippō, and its official Korean-language organ, Maeil Sinbo, the United States would not go to war against Japan for Korean independence. Given the seeming impossibility of an American intervention, Yun lamented that the Korean demonstration would only arouse Japan's anger toward the “weak race” instead of winning its “good will,” and would eventually bring harm to the Korean people.2