105-Man Incident

Background

After seizing Korea's sovereignty in 1910, Imperial Japan regarded the nationalist movement in the northwestern provinces, including Pyeongan and Hwanghae, with particular suspicion. Presbyterian mission work was especially active in this region, which had many churches and Christian schools. A considerable number of church leaders and teachers belonged to the New People's Association (Sinminhoe), a secret society founded in 1907 by Ahn Chang-ho, Yi Seung-hun, Yun Chi-ho, and others. The association sought to build up the nation's strength through education and industry, and it also worked to establish independence army bases abroad.

In December 1910, An Myeong-geun, a cousin of An Jung-geun, was arrested while raising funds for the independence movement (the An Myeong-geun Incident). The Government-General expanded this into the Anak Incident, using it to round up leaders throughout Hwanghae Province. It then applied the same approach to target the New People's Association as a whole.

Course of Events

• 1911: The Government-General fabricated a charge that the New People's Association, using ministers and church members as its agents, had plotted to kill the first governor-general, Terauchi Masatake, as he traveled through the northwestern provinces. On October 24, police raided the Sinseong School, a Christian school in Seoncheon, North Pyeongan Province. They arrested 27 teachers and students who had just finished morning prayers and took them to Seoul, and they subsequently arrested leaders of the Seoncheon Church as well. The total number of those detained is reported to have reached some 600.
• Investigation: Police extracted false confessions through brutal torture, during which Kim Geun-hyeong and Jeong Hui-sun died. Rumors spread in the Japanese press that American missionaries such as George S. McCune (Korean name Yun San-on) and Samuel Moffett had been involved in the conspiracy.
• 1912: More than 120 people were indicted and tried before the Gyeongseong District Court. In court, the defendants displayed the marks of torture and maintained that their confessions were false. Nevertheless, on September 28, 105 of them were convicted. Six—Yun Chi-ho, Yang Gi-tak, Yi Seung-hun, An Tae-guk, Im Chi-jeong, and Yu Dong-yeol—were sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.
• 1913: In March, the appellate court, the Gyeongseong Court of Review, acquitted 99 defendants. Only six—Yun Chi-ho, Yang Gi-tak, An Tae-guk, Yi Seung-hun, Im Chi-jeong, and Ok Gwan-bin—remained convicted.
• February 1915: The remaining six were released under a special pardon from the Japanese emperor.

Outcome and Impact

The domestic organization of the New People's Association suffered a severe blow and effectively collapsed. Many of those involved, however, went into exile abroad, and some scholars regard this as a catalyst for the growth of the anti-Japanese movement outside Korea.

Within church circles, the response of the missionaries was especially notable. Missionaries in Korea, together with mission boards in the United States and the Continuation Committee of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, brought the facts of the case to the attention of the international community. A British interdenominational missionary body visited the Japanese embassy in London to demand a fair trial. Some studies hold that this pressure from international opinion influenced the outcome of the appeal.

Those involved later took divergent paths. Yi Seung-hun and Yi Myeong-ryong were among the national representatives who signed the Declaration of Independence during the March First Movement (→ The March First Movement and Christianity). Yun Chi-ho, by contrast, gradually turned toward collaboration with Japan after his release.

Assessment

Korean historians generally regard the 105-Man Incident as a fabricated case that relied on a police-scripted narrative and confessions obtained under torture. It is considered the largest of the cases in which Imperial Japan suppressed the nationalist movement during the 1910s.

Some researchers, however, point out that an armed-struggle faction did exist within the New People's Association and that the assassination of the governor-general may have been discussed. In their view, the incident should be assessed as lying somewhere between "complete fabrication" and "Japanese exaggeration."

Korean church history treats the incident as the first large-scale suppression by Imperial Japan of the churches and Christian schools of the northwestern region, which had been growing since the Pyongyang Great Revival. It is seen as demonstrating how deeply the church was connected with the nationalist movement. L. George Paik (Baek Nak-jun), then a student at the Sinseong School, later recalled the incident as a momentous event that could not be omitted from either Korean church history or Korean national history.