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Jeju Keungut Preservation Society Chairperson Seo Sun-sil leads a memorial rite during the 3rd Tsushima-Jeju Memorial Ceremony for Victims of Jeju April 3 on Tsushima Island

A ceremony was held on the Japanese island of Tsushima to remember victims of the Jeju Massacre (also known as the Jeju April 3 Uprising and Massacre).

Held on Sept. 29, the 3rd Tsushima-Jeju Memorial Ceremony for Victims of Jeju April 3 was sponsored by the April 3 Hallasan Association, a Japanese group focused on the Jeju April 3 issue, and organized by officials involved in Jeju April 3-related activities in Japan and Jeju, including Zainichi Korean poet Kim Si-jong.

Beginning at 8 am that day at Sago Bay in Kamitsushima, the ceremony included the paying of respects at a memorial tower erected on a beach where hundreds of bodies had floated over during the events of Jeju April 3 and the Korean War, followed by a memorial rite at Sea Land in nearby Minatohama, led by Jeju Keun-gut (Great Rite) Preservation Society Chairperson Seo Sun-sil and other society shamans.

Sharing his reaction while standing before the tower at the ceremony that day, Kim Si-jong explained, “Tsushima collected the bodies of hundreds of lost and massacred people who floated over from the Korean Peninsula around the time of Jeju April 3 and 1950, and they even built a memorial tower to soothe their souls.

“Standing in front of the tower and hearing the sound of the Tsushima waves, which seem to come from the spirits themselves, I feel as though the victims are bringing us together,” he said.

Japan

Kim also said, “The massacres of people in preventive custody during Jeju April 3 and the Korean War and the national tragedy of the Korean Peninsula’s division into South and North trace back to the colonial rule by imperial Japan.”

“This memorial tower will serve to perpetuate the remembered forever as a benevolent edifice soothing not only the spirits of the victims, but the hearts of the Korean and Japanese people,” he continued.

“As an event connecting Tsushima and Jeju, the Jeju April 3 memorial festival is destined to become something that the South Korean and Japanese publics do together across their borders,” said Isamu Nagata, an adviser with the April 3 Hallasan Association, which organized the ceremony.

The gut (traditional exorcism) ceremony held at Sea Land in Minatohama included a “yowangjil” rite to comfort the victims by raising the drowned spirits upon onto land.

The memorial tower at Sago Bay was erected at a site where the drifting bodies of Koreans that arrived on the island around 1950 were buried in May 2007, in accordance with the will of Hikaru Eto – father of Tsushima resident Yukiharu Eto, 62 – who joined other residents in collecting the bodies and comforting their spirits at the time.

The tower bears a message reading, “The bodies of people of all ages, men and women, who were killed in the horrors of the Korean War washed up here, crossing the harsh waves of the strait from the Korean Peninsula. They number in the hundreds.” An article in the Tsushima Shimbun newspaper at the time noted, “Some of the bodies had their wrists bound with wire and their ankles bound with cords. Scientifically, the bodies that drifted onto Tsushima’s western Izuhara shore are likely to have been people washing over from Jeju.”

The Jeju April 3 Hallasan Association previously held a memorial ceremony for the Jeju April 3 missing last April at a boatyard site in Jeju’s Geonip neighborhood.

By Huh Ho-joon, staff reporter

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