Bagyeoruisa Birthplace Site

This is the house where Bak Yeol (1902–1974) was born, a leading nationalist anarchist who was arrested on a charge of high treason during the Great Kanto Earthquake while planning to assassinate the Japanese emperor and his son in 1923, and who subsequently spent twenty-three years in prison. Bak Yeol's birth name was Hyeoksik, and his clan seat was Hamyang; he was born the youngest of three sons and one daughter to his father Bak Ji-su and mother Jeong Seon-dong. When the household registration law (minjeokbeop) took effect he changed his name to Junsik, and later changed it again to Yeol. He graduated from Hamchang Public Common School in 1915 and moved to Seoul the following year to enter the teacher-training department of Gyeongseong Second High Common School, but was expelled in 1919 for taking part in the March First Independence Movement. That same year he went to Japan, where he worked his way through a regular English-language school while delivering newspapers and working at a paper mill, and it was during this period that he committed himself to the anarchist movement. Opposing the existing power structure and the emperor system, he organised the Heukdohoe (Black Wave Society) to overthrow them by force, and it was then that he met Kaneko Fumiko, with whom he thereafter shared his fate. After his arrest in the high treason case, he was released upon Korea's liberation in 1945, organised the Joseon Association for National Construction, and went on to serve as head of the Korean Residents Union in Japan. He returned to Korea in 1948 for the founding of the government of the Republic of Korea, but was abducted to North Korea during the Korean War. He died in North Korea in January 1974 at the age of seventy-three, and in March 1989 was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit for National Foundation, Presidential Medal, by the Republic of Korea.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Mungyeong, Gyeongbuk

Designation

Provincial Monument · 시도기념물