{"id":135,"date":"2013-08-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-15T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2013\/08\/15\/post-128-august-15th-independence-day\/"},"modified":"2013-08-15T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-15T00:00:00","slug":"post-128-august-15th-independence-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2013\/08\/15\/post-128-august-15th-independence-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-128: August 15th Independence Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n1945<\/strong><\/font>
<\/span>August 6th:<\/strong> <\/font>An American atomic bomb destroys Hiroshima.
August 9th:<\/strong><\/font> An American atomic bomb destroys Nagasak<\/span>i.
August 15th<\/strong>, 12:00 Noon: <\/font>The Emperor of Japan<\/span> announces Japanese surrender via radio.
A<\/span>ugust 15th, 12:01 PM:<\/strong><\/font> The Japanese Empire is dissolved; all overseas possessions are released. The war is over.\n<\/div>\n
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And so it goes that Koreans celebrate August 15th as Independence Day (\uad11\ubcf5\uc808). (Or, some do. I had to work a full day. Mandatory. Overtime pay, at least. So they say.)<\/p>\n

Students were depressed\/sullen about being compelled to “study” on a national holiday. Speaking of students: North Korea teaches its youth that August 15th was when Japan surrendered to Kim Il-Sung’s triumphant rebel army. A sheer fantasy. South Korean education has, from what I gather, a trace of that kind of thing, too. Students have expressed to me their idea that Japan was partly compelled to surrender because of pressure from Korean rebels.<\/p>\n

Koreans put more emotion into another “independence day”, March 1st. A nationalistic anti-Japanese uprising occurred in 1919 on that day. It failed, but it was <\/em>a native-Korean effort all around. (In fact, Japan largely controlled Korea as a puppet from the 1890s or even 1880s, and fully-annexed Korea in 1910. That means that in 1945, only the very oldest of Koreans could remember a truly independent Korea. Syngman Rhee<\/a> [born 1875] may have been one.)<\/p>\n

March 1st is untouchable. I’ve never heard of anyone working on it. It’s also the beginning of the Korean school year.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\nAt 2:00 PM (or sixty-eight years and two hours after independence), I <\/span>met a friend, J.A., for a lunch of kong-guk-su<\/em> (\ucf69\uad6d\uc218, a summer food) at “Kimbap Heaven”. He works at another hagwon <\/em>(language institute). His is in the Sang-Dong neighborhood of Bucheon. J.A. had this national holiday off, unlike me.<\/p>\n

It was a lively meeting. I talked very quickly, knowing I had to be teaching again by 3:00. \/ J.A. <\/span>is in better spirits than I’ve ever seen him, I think. He was excited to learn a very-big “Starbucks” is opening right below my workplace.\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1945August 6th: An American atomic bomb destroys Hiroshima.August 9th: An American atomic bomb destroys Nagasaki.August 15th, 12:00 Noon: The Emperor of Japan announces Japanese surrender via radio.August 15th, 12:01 PM: The Japanese Empire is dissolved; all overseas possessions are released. The war is over. And so it goes that Koreans celebrate August 15th as Independence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}