Deaths in Prison of Yi Yuk-sa and Yun Dong-ju

Also called: resistance poetry

Yi Yuk-sa, who wrote resistance poetry under Japan’s late policy of erasing Korean identity, died in a Beijing jail in 1944, and Yun Dong-ju in Fukuoka Prison in 1945.

From the late 1930s Japan closed Korean-language newspapers and herded writers into bodies such as the Korean Writers’ Association to praise the war of aggression. Some poets never laid down their pens.

Yi Yuk-sa (born Yi Won-rok) joined the Heroic Corps, graduated from the Korean Revolutionary Military and Political Cadre School and was jailed many times; his pen name is said to come from his first prisoner number, 264. In "The Wilderness", "The Summit" and "Green Grapes" he sang of unbending will and longing for a coming hero, and he died in January 1944 in the Japanese consulate jail in Beijing. Yun Dong-ju, from Myeongdong village in North Jiandao, finished Yonhi College and was arrested in 1943 while studying in Japan on charges of independence activity; he died in Fukuoka Prison on 16 February 1945. "Prologue", "Self-Portrait" and "Confession" carry a colonized intellectual’s shame and self-reflection, and he became known through the posthumous collection "Sky, Wind, Stars and Poems" (1948).