White waves, green water, and black volcanic rock, stirred by high wind. The view was wild, but inside the Jeju coffee shop, all was calm. A 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 public goods in the United States, we cherished what we found in South Korea. In Seoul and Jeju Island, we walked on wide sidewalks across urban neighborhoods, enjoyed parks, and had public access to the waterfront. We used the outdoor gym equipment, available every three blocks on Jeju. They were always in use, often by groups of children or elders.
Jeju Island was more urban than I expected. The cities were utilitarian, clean, and busy. The beauty of the Jeju Island coast unfolded for us over the month. We came to admire the volcanic rock, the sky vistas, and the green cliffs. I adjusted and then fell in love with Korean food. My favorites: snail salad, abalone noodles with kimchi, wild ginseng kimbap, and a whole mackerel that came with six side dishes and complex eating instructions.
We were in South Korea during a time of fire and ferment. Our visit coincided with a President’s fall, the anniversary of a genocide on Jeju Island, and US and Russian military exercises on the peninsula. It was a month of forest fires and emergency declarations. Yet we also found peace and inspiration there.
4/3 Massacre Remembrance and Peace Park .
April 3 was the 77th anniversary of the day when US-led Korean troops murdered 30,000 and incarcerated tens of thousands of Jeju Islanders in an “anti-Communist” rampage. Women were systematically raped. No one on Jeju escaped psychological damage. In the decades following, an official silence and social stigma magnified the wounds, multiplying 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.
Although Jeju islanders have made official requests for apologies from the US —the latest directed at the Biden administration — the US has refused.
We first visited the park in mid-March. The park museum took us down a dark hallway to help us understand the experience of those who fled into caves. The narrative was explicit about US complicity. No, 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 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 ferocity of the massacre, the policy of mass rape, the incarceration of survivors 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 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 only for South Koreans. 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.
We crossed paths with one other visitor at the encircled statue of a woman and baby, massacred while crouched in a fetal position. He wanted to make sure we understood the role of our government: They gave the orders.
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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, those whose remains disappeared, those who died in 1948, and those victims who passed away since then. Inside the Columbarium is a contested list of those deemed worthy of the title ‘innocent victim’. In other words, despite the finality of marble and steel, 4/3 is a still-debated past. History is now.
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 in which the US is also culpable.
On April 3, we joined 20,000 Koreans at the Peace Park for the memorial service.The ceremony was televised. The acting President Han Duck-soo and other dignitaries spoke of contrition and promised reparations. There were no US dignitaries there to bow and ask for forgiveness.
Anti-Japanese Movements Museum and Monument
One can not fully understand 4/3 without also visiting the Anti-Japanese Movements Museum, which documents and celebrates anti-colonial movements on Jeju, during the Japanese Occupation, 1905-1945. Students, farmers, laborers, Buddhist and Catholic priests, and women divers all played a part. They were inspired by, and helped to build, early 20th-century socialism, labor unionism, liberation theology, feminism, and tenant farmer agrarian radicalism. Like the 4/3 Peace Park, we were awed by the size of the memorial grounds. The 4/3 and anti-colonial memorials are two chapters of one continuous struggle for independence and social justice on Jeju Island. Those who organized against the Japanese also mobilized for their land and labor rights and sovereignty in 1948. They opposed the division of Korea by foreign powers.
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. Burning incense at a mountain gravesite was the cause of one of the fires. We canceled our hike on Hallasan Mountain and took a bus ride to Seogwipo, where the air was clearer. We walked 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 eternal youth.
US/S. Korea Military Exercises
On the Olle Trail in Seogwipo, we passed 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. While we were on Jeju, 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.
Impeachment of Yoon Suk Yeol
A drama unfolded in the political sphere while we were in South Korea. President Yoon Suk Yeol had declared Martial Law in December. Koreans reacted swiftly and en masse to remove and put him behind bars. He emerged from incarceration in March, and the Supreme Court was tasked with deciding if he could return to office or jail. The judges took their time emerging with a decision. There were opposing demonstrations daily in Seoul. Yoon Suk Yeol’s supporters carried US flags and signs saying Make Korea Great Again.
When the Supreme Court announced it would unveil its decision 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. It was such a pleasure to see overjoyed people posing for the press and each other, fists high and smiles wide.
Jeju diaspora in Osaka, Japan,
We visited the Jeju University museum to see its exhibit of Jeju diaspora in Osaka, Japan. The migration began in the 1920s. They came to work. Some stayed, despite official second-class status, with laws barring citizenship, circumscribing work, and forbidding Korean language education. Later, we would visit Ikaino-tsu in Osaka and the Koreatown Museum. The story told there was one of triumph over adversity in a neighborhood that was now a tourist destination.
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. Burning incense at a mountain gravesite was the cause of one of the fires. We canceled our hike on Hallasan Mountain and took a bus ride to Seogwipo, where the air was clearer. We walked 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 eternal youth.
US/S. Korea Military Exercises
On the Olle Trail in Seogwipo, we passed 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. While we were on Jeju, 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.
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; and Corfu, Greece; 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 also have places, hidden from the mainland, where you are as likely to find asylums, prisons, and military bases. As a scholar of Latin America, I thought about Cuba and Puerto Rico. When the US 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.
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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. 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 a ritual that kept them alive. We joined them, walking back and forth ten times until our feet wrinkled, making tiny, erasable imprints in the sand.
This essay about a visit to Jeju Island in March/April 2025 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.
