Yun Dong-ju
Poet of "Prologue" and "Confession", arrested while studying in Japan, who died in Fukuoka Prison
Born in Myeongdong village in northern Jiandao, he grew up with his cousin Song Mong-gyu and with Moon Ik-hwan. He attended the Myeongdong and Eunjin schools and then Soongsil Middle School in Pyongyang, which he left in protest at forced Shinto shrine worship, returning to Yongjeong. In 1938 he entered the literature department of Yonhi College in Seoul.
Before graduating in 1941 he gathered nineteen poems, among them "Prelude," "Self-Portrait" and "Counting the Stars at Night," as Sky, Wind, Stars and Poetry, but friends warned of the censors and he left only three handwritten copies. In these poems he wished to "look up to heaven without a speck of shame until the day I die," voicing the shame and self-examination of a colonised intellectual. In 1942, having had to adopt a Japanese name in order to study abroad, a pain he recorded in "Confession," he went to Japan and studied at Rikkyo University and then Doshisha University in Kyoto.
In July 1943 he and Song Mong-gyu were arrested for plotting independence activity under the Peace Preservation Law, sentenced to two years and held in Fukuoka Prison. He died there on 16 February 1945, aged twenty-seven, six months before liberation; Song died in the same prison less than a month later. Testimony that the once healthy young man weakened after repeated injections of an unknown substance in prison has led some to believe he was a victim of Japanese human experimentation. His poems were published posthumously in 1948 as Sky, Wind, Stars and Poetry, and he was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit for National Foundation (Independence Medal) in 1990.