White waves, green water, and black volcanic rock, stirred by high wind. The view was wild, but inside, all was calm. I was at a coffee shop in the Naedo neighborhood of Jeju City, on Jeju Island. A sweet Korean ballad played softly. I was alone. My partner in this Aging on the Run venture was grocery shopping, leaving me here so I could write.
I wanted to capture the contradictions I saw in a land where English was less helpful than anywhere else I had been. I had mastered thank you, hello, sorry, and I love you. along with useless phrases from Korean dramas: Really? It’s a deal! You can do it!.
Coming from months in Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and Sri Lanka, I was struck by South Korean infrastructure. Though the current government was regressive, it was obvious that the people had come to expect and receive a quality commons. As the Trump administration began to unravel all that is good about public welfare in the United States, we cherished what we found in South Korea. In Seoul, we walked across urban neighborhoods on sidewalks with ramps, wide and uncluttered, unlike any we found in Europe. On Jeju, we relished the potable, delicious water, public bathrooms that were clean, free, and plentiful, the parks, and public access to the waterfront. Every three blocks or so, there was a set of outdoor gym equipment, always in use, set to accommodate all ages.
Jeju Island is more urban than I expected, and the cities are neither pretty nor ugly. They are utilitarian, clean, and busy. The water is never far away. The beauty of the Jeju Island coast unfolds. You adjust to the volcanic rock, the vistas, the green cliffs, and the whimsical public art. The sky! Cafes serve delicious, cheap, and plentiful plates of seafood. I fell in love with a snail salad, wild ginseng gimbap, and bowls of abalone and noodles served with oodles of refillable vegetable sides, a whole mackerel, and complex eating instructions.
We were in South Korea March 3- April 8, 2025, a time of fire and ferment.
4/3 Massacre
April 3 was the 77th anniversary of the day when US-led Korean troops began a rampage, murdering 30,000 Jeju Islanders, raping women and incarcerating tens of thousands. No one on the Island escaped psychological damage. In the decades following, an official silence and social stigma magnified the wounds — an Island of post-traumatic stress and generational trauma.
In the 1990s, people began to speak and demand reparations. In 2000, the government signed an official apology into law and began building a 4/3 Peace Park to memorialize those killed, disappeared, and traumatized. That process of repair is ongoing. Three months before we arrived, there was a ceremony to properly bury the remains of a victim, just uncovered and identified. The U.S. has not apologized, though there have been direct requests, the latest directed at the Biden administration.
I first found out about the Massacre when I saw that Jeju activists concerned about Gaza, carried out an action at the Peace Park, to demand an end to Korean complicity in a current genocide of similar ferocity to 4/3. We visited the park on our own in mid-March. There was only one other visitor. When we crossed paths among the vast grounds, He wanted us not to miss the statue of a young mother and child who were massacred while fleeing. He also wanted to make sure we understood the role of our government: They gave the orders.
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We came again on April 3, joining 20,000 Korean people sitting on folding chairs, filling up only a small fraction of the park space. The acting President Han Duck-soo was there, and other dignitaries, speaking contrition and promising reparations. There were no US dignitaries there to bow and ask for forgiveness. The ceremony, in Korean, was televised.
The museum was open this time. The exhibit, which is designed like a cave to simulate the experience of those who tried to escape capture by hiding in mountain caves, is explicit about US complicity. Complicity is not the right word. The massacre was US policy, carried out by Korean soldiers.
Why?
It helps to think of it as connected to the Korean War, to US post-WWII anti-communism, to the McCarthy era. The US hired former Japanese police and government officials to help them carry out their campaign to wipe out communism on the “red island.” The geography of a small, wayward island allowed the United States and South Korea to commit war crimes without global scrutiny. The secret of this massacre endures.
The ferocity of the massacre, the policy of mass rape, the incarceration of survivers in concentration pens, the decades of repression of the story and oppression of anyone related to those who died, as ‘red by association,’ all of these outrages that must be uncovered, make it difficult to talk about and fully understand what people were rebelling about in April of 1948. They denounced the North/South division. They boycotted and protested an election that was for South Korea only. The population burgeoned as migrant workers returned home from Japan. A barley harvest failed. People were hungry and suffering from a cholera epidemic. They wanted land and food, and sovereignty. A tiny band of them had created a poorly armed rebel group. Radical groups had organized for decades against Japanese rule.
The Park was awe inspiring for its size and the number of different kinds of memorials within its grounds,— wall, representing those who can be named, and those who can not, those who can be buried, and those who remains dissappeared, those who died in 1948, and those who were victims who passed away since then. Inside the Columbarium is a contested list of those deemed worthy of the title of innocent victim. In other words, despite the finality of marble and steel, 4/3 is a still-debated past. History is now.
We also visited the Park and museum that commemorates the Anti-Japanese movements on Jeju, during the Japanese Occupation, 1905-1945. The sectors involved included students, farmers, labor, Buddhist and Catholic priests, and women divers. Socialism, labor unionism, liberation theology, feminism, and Zapatista-like (land for those who till it!) agrarian radicalism of tenant farmers were all ideological aspects of these movements. Like the 4/3 Peace Park, we were awed by the size of the memorial grounds. Though the memorials are far apart on the Island, we realized they cover two chapters of Jeju’s radical history that were one continuous struggle for independence and social justice. Those who organized against the Japanese also mobilized for their land and labor rights and sovereignty in 1948. They opposed the division of Korea, North and South, by foreign powers. One can not understand 4/3 without coming here.
Impeachment of Yoon Suk Yeol
A drama unfolded in the political sphere. President Yoon Suk Yeol, (who declared Martial Law in December and was removed and jailed after the people arose and defended their Constitution) got out of jail. The Supreme Court, tasked with deciding if he could return to office or jail, took its time. There were opposing demonstrations daily in Seoul. Though the majority wanted him gone, the split in public opinion was extreme, reminiscent of the United States. Yoon Suk Yeol’s supporters carried US flags and signs saying Make Korea Great Again. When it was announced that the decision would come down on April 4, half the Korean police force was mobilized in Seoul.
We took a bus to City Hall in Jeju City, arriving just in time to see a row of police officers leave after they heard the verdict, leaving a small crowd of very happy people posing for the press and each other, fists high and smiles wide.
US/S. Korea Military Exercises
US and South Korea carried out joint military exercises near the DMZ, and Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin renewed their exchange—North Korean cannon fodder for Russian military hardware. While these four regimes created havoc, David and I walked the serene Olle Trail in Seogwipo, passing the Jeju Naval Base in Gangjeong. We hoped, in vain, to connect with activists who have been trying to shut down this US/Korean joint venture for decades. The activists, led by Jeju islanders and supported by US peace activists, successfully postponed its construction three times. They argue that the base is a violation of the declaration that came with the official 4/3 apology, making Jeju Island a haven of peace
Wildfires
Three hundred villages with community gravesites were obliterated during the 4/3 massacre, and 109 of them never recovered. People still return to the site of their ancestors to visit gravesites. While we were on Jeju, wildfires of unprecedented ferocity created unhealthy air for us and death and destruction for Sancheong and Uiseong Counties on the Korean mainland. Our phones sent us Public Safety Alerts in Korean several times a day, warning us to stay out of the mountains and refrain from tending graves. Incense at a mountain village gravesite caused one of the fires. We canceled our hike on Hallasan Mountain and took a bus ride to Seogwipo, where the air was clearer, walking the Olle Trail past the storied Jeonbang Waterfall, where people climbed down 300 steps to take selfies with the Falls, and make stone towers on the water. We also visited a Museum—a joint project of China and South Korea—celebrating the myths surrounding the Chinese envoy who traveled to Jeju with a boat full of youth (500 or 3,000, depending on the source), to search for the elixir of internal youth.
Jeju diaspora in Osaka, Japan,
We visited Jeju University and happened on an exhibit in the museum of Jeju diaspora in Osaka, Japan. These were working-class people who in the 1920s, began a migrant stream in search of work. Like often happens, a number of them stayed, despite official second-class status, with laws barring citizenship, circumscribing work, and forbidding Korean language education. I am finishing this essay in Ikaino-tsu in Osaka, at the coffee shop attached to the Koreatown Museum. The story told here is of triumph over adversity in a neighborhood that is now a tourist destination.
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Past experiences and knowledge colored my impressions of Jeju. I thought about islands we recently visited: Büyükada, off the coast of Istanbul, Turkey, Schiermonnikoog, in The Netherlands, Corfu, off the Greek coast, islands that today are tourist playgrounds, but have histories that include harsh exploitation of land and labor and a contradictory mix of harboring the oppressor and protecting the oppressed. They are places, hidden from the mainland, where you are as likely to find asylums, prisons, and military bases as individuals and institutions fermenting liberation.
I was struck by the centrality of the United States in Jeju’s history. As a scholar of Latin America, I thought about Cuba and Puerto Rico. When the U S was fighting its “splendid little war” against Spain, in 1898, gaining an empire in the Caribbean and the Philippines, it was also establishing a toehold in Korea, with diplomats, troops and missionaries, beginning a neo-colonial relationship that would be its modus operandi in the 20th century. For Jeju Island,
In our apartment in Jeju City, we watched spring creep in. Dead grass disappeared under new growth. Across the way, a field of deep green canola turned brilliant yellow, before it was unceremoniously plowed, leaving only an edge of color. Next door was an abandoned field where the yellow crop was a weed, growing tall, unwieldy —sunshine for my mornings. One day, a collective of women planted onions. I watched their work while drinking my coffee.
All around us people in our age cohort engaged in hard labor, diving for abalone, fishing, squatting to clean seaweed, or peeling the roots off a mess of scallions.
We noticed that locals our age used the nearby beach as a track. Younger people wrote love messages in the sand and built castles, but our cohort was serious about the ritual that kept them alive. We joined them. On our last day, we walked back and forth ten times until our feet wrinkled, making tiny, erasable imprints in the sand.
Saranghae Jeju.
