My Family

My life began in the 1910s when Korea had suffered the worst tragic calamities. By the time I was born,

Korea was already under the Japanese colonial rule. Korea was under the thumb of Japanese Emperor

through a Japan-Korea Annexation agreement. The Korean people became slaves of Japanese Governor

General of Korea. Korea, with her long, brilliant history, with rich natural resources and clear waterways,

had become the stomping ground of Japanese boots and gun carriage wheels.

The Korean people seethed with anger and wept with sorrow over the loss of their nationhood. Countless

patriots could not bear the tragedy that had befallen on Korea and opted to end their lives than to live

under the Japanese yoke. They chose honorable death over shameful submission to the much despised

Japanese.

Police and civil servants - and even school teachers - wore uniforms and carried samurai swords, and

Korea was subjected to the most barbaric secret police state terrorism ever known to man. Under

Emperor's direction, the Governor General commanded the military in Korea and yielded life and death

powers over the Korean people. All Korean political organizations and scholastic entities were disbanded

by the Governor General.

Our patriots were beaten with cowhide whips in Japanese torture chambers and prison cells. Japanese

police applied the notorious Tokugawa Shogunate torture methods on our patriots; red-hot iron rods were

mercilessly thrust into their bodies.

The Governor General issued edict after edict to enslave the Korean people: we were forced to color our

traditional white attires; Japanese businessmen swarmed over Korea and took away our land and natural

resources. They stole our national treasures and took them to Japan.

I have been to several nations that had been colonies and found no former colony that was forced to

change family names and was forbidden to speak their native language; no colony was forced to give

people's cooking pots and eating utensils to their colonists. No imperialists, with the sole exception of

Japan, had perpetuated such inhuman acts.

Korea in those days was a living Hell, unfit for human habitation. The Korean people were, in all aspects,

walking stiffs; their spirits were dead, alive though their bodies were. Lenin's prediction that "Japan's

hitherto unparalleled savage tortures of the Korean patriots and barbaric exploitation of Korea will

continue, no matter what" was right on the mark.

The years of my childhood saw various imperial powers fighting over colonial spoils. In the year I was

born, US Marines stormed Honduras, France made Morocco her protectorate, and Italy took Turkey's

Rotus island. In Korea, the Land Examination Law was imposed by the Japanese to legitimize their land

grab.

In short, it was my misfortune to be born in an era of evil events and to grow up seeing the worst of the

Japanese savagery. These left indelible marks on my memory and shaped my future activities. My father

told me how Korea got herself into the sat situation she was in, and I became angry at the elite of Korea

who had let it happen. I swore then and there to devote the rest of my life to the task of driving out the

Japanese colonists from Korea.

While other nations went about in mighty warships and rode shiny trains, our feudal leaders rode filthy

scrawny donkeys wearing horse-hair hats and had wasted several hundred years in a stale state of stupor

and suffocating economic stagnation. They kowtowed to foreign gunboat diplomacy and opened up the

gate for foreign invasion and exploitation; Korea became an easy prey for the imperialists.

The Queen of Korea, still a sovereign nation in 1895, was cut to pieces in front of her own palace by

foreign troops, and so-called King was locked up in a foreign legation for over a year in his own country.

The King's father was kidnapped by a foreign power and Korea had to apologize for the incident.

Guarding the palace was delegated to foreign troops. Who were to protect the nation and care for the

Korean people in a situation such as this?

Though a tiny speck in the scheme of the Universe a family may be, it is an essential part of the world and

it cannot live outside the world. The misfortune of Korea hit my family without mercy like a tidal wave.

My family stood firm amidst the disasters and threats, weeping and laughing with the nation, and stood

tall in the eye of the tornados sweeping the nation.

I was told that my great-great grandfather came from Chun-ju, North Chul-ra Province, in search of a

better life in north Korea. My great grandfather, Kim Ung Woo, settled in Mangyong-dae in 1860. He

was born in Jung-sung-ri, Pyongyang, and eked out a living farming. Lee Pyong Taek, a landowner in

Pyongyang made him a caretaker of Lee's ancestral burial ground in Mangyong-dae. That was how we

got to be in Mangyng-dae.

..with the century by prezident/PAGE 1-2) 

KIM IL SUNG