Pak Chungyang served Japan's rule of Korea and never apologised for it
Pak Chungyang rose from a poor family to govern province after province under Japanese colonial rule in Korea, tearing down Daegu's old city walls along the way. Arrested as a traitor in 1949, he refused to recant, insisting colonial rule had modernised the country. In 2008 he was formally listed as a collaborator.
Born in 1872 in Yangju County, Gyeonggi Province, Pak joined the reformist Independence Club as a youth and grew bitter when the Korean Empire suppressed it. The 1894 assassination of reformer Kim Ok-kyun by an agent later rewarded with high office deepened his hostility to the Korean state. Selected in 1897 to study in Japan as a state student, he paid his own way, studied banking and police studies, adopted the Japanese name Yamamoto Shin and absorbed Ito Hirobumi's ideas about national wealth and military strength.
Back in Korea he worked as a military interpreter in the Russo-Japanese War and in 1906 became governor of Daegu. Without official permission he secretly hired Japanese workers to demolish the Daegu town walls; when the Korean government tried to punish him, Ito protected him. He then remodelled the city's streets and helped found the Dojin hospital and medical school, and he defended press freedom even for journals that mocked him.
After Japan annexed Korea in 1910 he governed South Chungcheong until 1915, later heading Hwanghae and North Chungcheong provinces under their Japanese names. He opposed the March First independence movement of 1919 and founded a group to discourage protesters, which led old friends Philip Jaisohn and Yun Chi-ho to break with him. After the 1923 Kantō earthquake he urged Japan to release Koreans arrested in its aftermath. He rose to vice-chairman of the colonial Privy Council, visited Japanese troops in Singapore during the Pacific War, and in April 1945 entered Japan's House of Peers.
Korea's liberation in August 1945 did not soften him. He stayed in Daegu, ridiculed independence veterans, and when arrested under the anti-traitor law in January 1949 defended his beliefs in court. Released on bail weeks later on health grounds, he died in 1959. South Korea's Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities named him a pro-Japanese collaborator in 2008.
Source: Pak Chungyang
