Son Yang-won

On October 21, 1948, in Suncheon, a city in the southwest of Korea, two brothers were shot dead. Dong-in was twenty-four. Dong-sin was nineteen. They were active in a Christian student group. Left-wing students of their own age had seized them and beaten them. The brothers were suspected of siding with the Americans. Then came the shots.

At the spot where it happened, on a shopping street now called Hwanggeum-ro, a small memorial plaque has stood since January 2015. It is sixty centimeters wide and a hundred and twenty centimeters high. It tells who the brothers were and how they died.

Their father was the pastor of a leprosy colony near Yeosu, on the south coast. His name was Son Yang-won. He was forty-six. Shortly afterward he did something Korea has never forgotten. He worked to save one of the young men involved in the killing from execution. And when that succeeded, he took him into his home as a son.

Ever since, Korean Christians have called him “the atomic bomb of love.” The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, the national reference work, calls him a martyr. He spent almost five years in prison because he would not bow to the Japanese gods. Two years after the death of his sons, he himself was shot.

To understand how a father gets to that point, we have to go back to a village in the south, and to a boy who would not bow at school.

A BOW TOWARD TOKYO

Son Yang-won was born on July 7, 1902, in Chilwon, in Haman County, in South Gyeongsang Province. As a child he was called Son Yeon-jun. He was the eldest son. Around 1909 he and his father became Christians. The Korean Wikipedia gives 1908, the encyclopedia 1909. According to that Korean Wikipedia, his father, Son Jong-il, later became an elder in the church at Chilwon.

In those years Korea was a country losing its freedom. Japan annexed it in 1910. Until 1945 Korea was a Japanese colony. At school, children bowed in the direction of the imperial palace in Tokyo. In Japan the emperor was regarded as divine.

The young Son refused that bow. He was expelled from primary school for it. An Australian missionary, Macrae, protested to the school, and the boy was allowed back. That is how the encyclopedia tells it. In the south of Korea at that time, the missionaries were mostly Australian Presbyterians. Presbyterians are Protestants in the tradition of Calvin, with a church led by elders and ministers. According to the Korean Wikipedia, Macrae baptized the boy in 1918.

In 1919 he went to the Jungdong School in Seoul. That year the March 1st Movement broke out, a great, peaceful uprising for Korean independence. Many Christians took part. So did his father. He was locked up in Masan prison, and his son had to leave the school in Seoul. Ninety-five years later, in 2014, the same school awarded Son Yang-won an honorary diploma.

TOKYO, AND WHAT HE SAW THERE

In 1921 he left for Japan. In Tokyo he attended evening classes at a secondary school in Sugamo. So for years he lived in the country that occupied his own.

According to the Korean Wikipedia, he came into contact there with a church that devoted itself to people with leprosy and to street evangelism. It is said to have moved him. I have not found that detail in other sources. It does fit with what came next.

Back in Korea he married Jeong Yang-sun. The encyclopedia gives 1924 as the year. They had four sons and three daughters. In 1926 he began studying at the South Gyeongsang Bible Institute, a school of the Australian mission. According to the encyclopedia, he became a student there of Ju Ki-cheol, who has a chapter in an earlier volume of this series.

A CHURCH AMONG THE SICK

His first post as an assistant evangelist was the church of Sangaewon, a leprosy institution near Busan. He did not stay long. According to the encyclopedia, he was criticized for using texts from Sungseo Joseon, a Korean Christian magazine, in his Bible studies. He left and became an itinerant evangelist, traveling through villages near Ulsan and Yangsan.

In Korea, as everywhere, leprosy was a disease people feared. Those who caught it often lost their family, their work and their village. There were no good medicines yet. Anyone who went to work among leprosy patients went to live on the margins of society.

In 1938 Son completed his training at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea. According to the Korean Wikipedia, the students received their diplomas by mail, because the school had been closed. He was thirty-six.

After that he became pastor of the church at Aeyangwon. The encyclopedia gives 1938. An English-language study by Soo Kwang Lee, based on Korean biographies, gives July 14, 1939, as the date of his appointment. Aeyangwon was a leprosy institution near Yeosu, on the south coast. It had been started by American missionaries. According to an academic article, the work began in 1909 in Gwangju, when the missionary Wylie Forsythe brought a woman with leprosy to the mission hospital. Afterward the city of Gwangju no longer wanted the leprosy village. By 1928 the move to Yeocheon, an area that is now part of Yeosu, was complete.

There is a story about him that you come across in Korean newspaper columns. He is said to have gone barefoot to a dangerous patient, prayed for him and sucked the pus from his wound. I have only found it in a later column, without a source. It belongs to the way he is remembered. Whether it happened that way, I do not know.

THE EMPEROR'S RELIGION

During those same 1930s, Japan increased the pressure. All Koreans had to pay their respects at Shinto shrines. Shinto is the old Japanese religion, which at the time was closely bound up with the worship of the emperor. The government called it a civic duty. Many Christians saw it as idolatry.

In September 1938, under Japanese pressure, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Korea had to accept Shinto worship. Some of the ministers gave in. Others refused. One of them was Ju Ki-cheol, a pastor in Pyongyang. He died in prison on April 21, 1944.

Son Yang-won refused too. On September 25, 1940, after a Wednesday evening service, the Yeosu police took him away. That date appears in the Korean Wikipedia and in Lee’s study. An English-language profile says that in a sermon he had warned that Japan would be judged. That profile was written by a school student and cites no source. So I put it here with a question mark.

How far do you go in obeying a government? In the 1930s that question was on the table in every Korean church. For Son the answer was simple. He would not bow to another god, not even when it was called a civic duty.

ALMOST FIVE YEARS

On the years in prison, the sources are not all equally precise. The encyclopedia says he was imprisoned from 1940 until liberation in 1945. The Korean Wikipedia gives more detail. First ten months at the Yeosu police station. Then a year and a half in Gwangju prison. In May 1943 he had served his sentence, but he was not released. He received a new sentence of life imprisonment, and was afterward held in Seoul and Cheongju.

An Australian church calendar of commemorations says that he was held in Gwangju prison, that the story of Ju Ki-cheol inspired him, and that he longed for martyrdom. According to the English-language profile, his father died while he was in prison. I have not been able to check either of these in a second source.

On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered. Korea was free. Son came out on August 17, according to the Korean Wikipedia and Lee’s study. He went back to Aeyangwon. In 1946 he was ordained as a minister. According to the same two sources, this took place in March, at a meeting of the South Gyeongsang Presbytery, the regional church assembly. He was then forty-three, and he had been preaching for twenty years. Until then he had worked as an evangelist, a pastor without full ordination.

A COUNTRY THAT BROKE IN TWO

Freedom did not last long. After the Japanese surrender, Korea was divided along the thirty-eighth parallel. In the north the Soviet Union and the Korean communists came to power. In the south, the United States and a fiercely anticommunist government. In 1948 they became two states.

On the night of October 19, 1948, the 14th Regiment of the South Korean army mutinied in Yeosu. The soldiers refused to go to Jeju Island, where the government was harshly crushing an uprising. Members of the communist party supported them. On October 20 the rebels also took Suncheon. They executed police officers, officials, right-wing families and members of Christian youth groups. On October 23 the government army retook Suncheon. Government troops then killed hundreds of civilians regarded as accomplices. A South Korean truth commission later arrived at a figure of 439 to 2,000 civilians killed in those reprisals. In Korea this history is called the Yeosu-Suncheon incident. To this day it is a painful chapter.

Dong-in and Dong-sin were in Suncheon. That is how they ended up on the wrong side of a gun.

WHAT HE DID WITH THE YOUNG MAN

After the city was retaken, the army and police went looking for the perpetrators. Anyone under suspicion could be killed without trial. The encyclopedia uses the term summary execution for this.

One of those arrested was a student named Ahn Jae-seon. He had been involved in the killing of the two brothers. Lee’s study calls him the leader of the group of students. Son Yang-won worked to save his life. According to the Australian commemoration calendar, he rescued him from anticommunist authorities who wanted to execute him. When that succeeded, he adopted him as his son. Ahn Jae-seon came to live with the family.

I read that sentence many times before I truly saw it. A father takes into his home the young man who was involved in the death of his children. At his table there are then two empty chairs and one new son.

There are more stories about how it happened. A Korean column says that Son could not go to the authorities himself, because he had to preach. He is said to have sent his daughter in his place. That daughter, Son Dong-hee, later wrote a book about her father herself. It has also been published in Japanese, but I have not been able to read it. The same column says that at his sons’ funeral he thanked God that his children had died as martyrs. There is also a text by Son himself. After the death of his sons he wrote a prayer of thanksgiving. It appears in his collected writings, published in English in 2009. Lee summarizes it in nine points; in Korea it is often passed on as ten. Son thanks God that his two sons died together as martyrs, while they were bringing the gospel. And he gives thanks for a loving heart to lead an enemy to repentance and embrace him as a son. That he spoke this prayer at the funeral comes from tradition. The rescue and the adoption are certain.

What later became of Ahn Jae-seon appears only in that same column. He is said to have gone to study theology, but to have stopped because he could not shake off his sense of guilt. He is said to have died of cancer. I cannot check this, and so I leave it at these few sentences.

THE ATOMIC BOMB

The story spread quickly. A pastor, Ahn Yong-jun, wrote a book about it with a title that stuck: Sarang-ui wonjatan, the atomic bomb of love. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was a word everyone knew. The nickname stayed with Son Yang-won. According to the encyclopedia, the book was translated into English and German, and made into a film.

Son himself meanwhile carried on with his work at Aeyangwon. He also remained a man who would not bow. In 1949 he opposed the salute to the national flag. He considered it idolatry just the same. The encyclopedia states this briefly and without explanation. I find it a telling detail. He had spent five years in prison because he would not bow to the Japanese emperor. Now Korea had a government of its own, and he did not simply bow to its symbol either.

STAYING

On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded the south. The Korean War had begun. Within a few weeks the North Korean army had occupied almost the whole of the south, including Yeosu.

Son Yang-won could have fled. Several sources say so. He stayed with the people of Aeyangwon. On September 13, 1950, he was arrested by the communists. According to Lee, their security office in Yulcheon, near Yeosu, took him into custody. He was held in Yeosu for about two weeks. The Korean Wikipedia records that he was tortured.

At the end of September the war turned. After the United Nations landing at Incheon on September 15, the North Korean troops withdrew. Son was taken away with other prisoners, in the direction of Suncheon. On the night of September 28, 1950, he was shot at Mipyeong, in an orchard on the edge of Yeosu. He was forty-eight. Some sources give September 27 or 29. The encyclopedia and the memorial hall hold to September 28.

He was buried beside his two sons. Their three graves lie next to the memorial hall at Aeyangwon.

WHOSE MARTYR?

After his death, Son Yang-won became one of the best-known Christians in Korea. His own words were preserved too. According to the source list of the Korean Wikipedia, Ahn Yong-jun published his letters from prison in 1952, and a collection of sermons in 1963. In 2008 the Korean institute KIATS published a selection of his writings in English, The Apostle of Love and Passion. If you want to hear his own voice, without the layer of later stories, you can start there.

His pen name was Sandol. It means living stone. Under that name, societies in Korea still keep his memory alive. A memorial hall opened in Yeosu in 1993, and a second one in his birthplace of Haman in 2015. There were a musical, an opera, documentaries. In Suncheon the plaque for his sons was unveiled in 2015. Writing about that plaque, the Seoul Shinmun said it also speaks of the brothers’ anticommunist patriotism.

There is a tension here that I want to name honestly. In 2013 the Korean theologian Choi Sang Do wrote a doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh on how Protestant churches in Korea designate their martyrs. He took Son Yang-won as one of his two main examples. In his view, after the war Son’s martyrdom was placed in a framework of anticommunism and nationalism. The story was also used to point out an enemy.

That does not make his life any less real. But it does recall something Son himself did in 1948. When everyone around him was busy deciding who the enemy was, he adopted one. In 2024 the Seoul Shinmun wrote about him again, in a series on the roots of Christianity in the southwest. In that same article a Korean church leader said that in a divided society the church must lead the way in reconciliation.

TWO EMPTY CHAIRS

What would you do if someone harmed your child? I do not ask that to corner you. I do not know the answer myself. I do not think Son Yang-won knew it in advance either. He was a man who already refused to bow at school, who went to school in Tokyo in the land of the occupier, who lived among the leprosy patients and who spent five years in a cell. When the moment came, he did not have years to think about it. He had a few days.

He gave the young man a home. The young man kept his own name, Ahn. The letters Son wrote from prison are now kept in the memorial hall at Aeyangwon. Beside the building lie three graves: a father and his two sons.