Hirobumi Ito and the Parkmun Temple

When I was young, “someone like Hirobumi Ito” was a swear word. I thought he was just a bad Japanese who was shot dead by Ahn Jung-geun, a Korean patriot. Later, I learned that he threatened and appeased King Gojong and his subjects to sign the Protectorate Treaty between Korea and Japan and became the first Governor-General of Korea. I was surprised to learn that he served as Japanese prime minister four times including the one as the first prime minister in the Meiji Cabinet and was respected by the Japanese people.

He was born as Risuke Hayashi as a son of a farmer in October 1841 and became Risuke Ito after his father was adopted as a foster son of the Ito family. After the launch of the Meiji government in 1868, he became the governor of Hyogo prefecture and started using the name, Hirobumi. Among Japanese, he is one of the heroes who led the Meiji reform and modernization. “Japan’s modernization did not start from this man. However, without him, modernization would not have progressed,” (an excerpt from Lee Jong-gak’s “Hirobumi Ito”) Jo Toyota wrote in Ito’s biography.

Moreover, he is perceived as a patriot who was killed by a Korean assassin. What is surprising is that many elderly Japanese envied his death at his funeral. “It is an honorable death to be killed by an assassin in the Manchuria, not on a tatami floor in a room.” (Shigenobu Okuma). His portrait was on the most-used 1,000-yen bill (used between 1963- and 1984), and his statues can be found everywhere across Japan including the Japanese parliamentary building. The Japanese Government-General of Korea built a temple in 1932 to honor his contributions: the Parkmun Temple.

The Seoul metropolitan government opposed Hotel Shilla’s plan to build a Hanok (traditional Korean house) hotel for the fourth time, arguing the site for the temple is a subject of cultural heritage protection. It is questionable whether the government officials know that Ahn Jun-saeng, Ahn’s second son, made a disgraceful apology to Ito’s son at the very temple in 1939. Jun-saeng bowed his head at the behest of the governor-general of Korea, saying, “I apologize on behalf of my father.” The DongA-Ilbo was the only newspaper issued in Korea back then and did not cover this forced apology, which partly contributed to the discontinuance of the newspaper’s publication in the ensuing year.