An Jung-geun

An Jung-geun: The Assassin Who Wrote a Peace Plan

At Harbin railway station on 26 October 1909, a young Korean in Western clothes stepped out of the crowd greeting Japan's most eminent statesman and fired a Browning pistol into him at close range. Itō Hirobumi — four times prime minister, architect of the Meiji constitution, first Resident-General of Korea — took three rounds to the torso and died on the platform. Four others were hit. The gunman made no attempt to escape. He waved a Korean flag and shouted, in Russian, "Korea! Hurrah!" Then, told that Itō was dead, he made the sign of the cross.

The Seven Stars of Haeju

He was born on 2 September 1879 in Haeju, in Hwanghae Province, into the Sunheung An clan; his father was An Tae-hun, his mother Jo Maria. His childhood name, An Eung-chil, came from seven birthmarks on his chest that resembled the Big Dipper. He was drawn early to marksmanship and martial training — Kim Ku, later the leader of Korea's provisional government, remembered him as an excellent shot with strong charisma.

At sixteen he was baptised a Catholic by the French priest Wilhelm, taking the name Thomas, which he would insist on for the rest of his life. The Church was also his door to Western learning: alongside classical Chinese he studied Western science, learned French, and became fluent in Russian. The combination — Confucian training, Catholic faith, European languages, a rifle — is unusual, and it explains almost everything he did afterwards.

Schoolmaster, Merchant, Soldier

Around twenty-five he went into the coal business. After the Eulsa Treaty of 1905 made Korea a Japanese protectorate, he redirected everything into education, founding two private schools in the northwest of the country and joining the National Debt Repayment Movement — a campaign to buy the nation out of the loans Japan was using to bind it.

By 1907 that route was closed. He went into exile in Vladivostok, joined the armed Korean resistance among the expatriate communities of the Russian Far East, and was made a lieutenant general of its forces, leading raids against Japanese troops. In 1909, with a group of comrades, he swore an oath of resistance and cut off the top joint of his left ring finger to seal it. The mutilated hand would become his signature.

Lushun

Russian guards seized him on the platform and held him two days before handing him to the Japanese. He was tried at Lushun — Port Arthur — and mounted a defence that was itself a political argument: he was not a murderer but a lieutenant general of the Korean army who had executed an enemy commander in wartime, and was entitled to treatment as a prisoner of war. The court refused the framing.

He submitted fifteen reasons why Itō deserved death, among them the murder of Empress Myeongseong, the forced abdication of Emperor Gojong, fourteen unequal treaties, the seizure of Korea's railways, mines and forests, the imposition of Japanese banknotes, the disbanding of the Korean army, the confiscation of Korean textbooks, the deception of the Japanese emperor, and the destruction of peace in Asia. Some of the fifteen were factually wrong. The prosecutor Mizobuchi Takao is reported to have told him: "From what you have told me, it is clear that you are a righteous man of East Asia. I can't believe a sentence of death will be imposed on a righteous man." After six hearings, it was.

The Unfinished Book

What he did with the months that followed is why he is remembered as more than a gunman. In his cell at Lushun he began *Dongyang Pyeonghwaron* — *On Peace in East Asia* — arguing that Korea, China and Japan should stand together against Western imperialism, and proposing concrete machinery for it: a joint military force and a common banknote shared between the three nations. Sasagawa Norikatsu of Meiji University has described the scheme as an anticipation of the European Union, and it preceded the League of Nations by a decade. It was left unfinished; among his last requests was more time to complete it, which was refused.

He also wrote. Prison guards — including Chiba Toshichi, who kept his work and carried it home to Japan — queued for his calligraphy, and he produced a substantial body of it, signed 大韓國人, "Great Korean," and stamped with the print of his left hand, the ring finger visibly short. Some of these pieces were designated Treasure No. 569 of the Republic of Korea in 1972. One reads: "Unless one reads every day, thorns grow in the mouth." He completed an autobiography in the same period.

Thirty

He was hanged on 26 March 1910, aged thirty, as a common criminal — he had asked to be shot as a soldier, and was refused. His mother sent white Korean clothes for the execution, and a message carried by his brothers: "Your death is for the sake of your country, and don't ask for your life in a cowardly manner. Your brave death for justice is final filial regard to your mother." Father Wilhelm administered the last rites in defiance of his bishop's prohibition; the Church had excommunicated An for the killing, and did not lift it until 1993.

He asked to be buried in a park in Harbin and moved to Korea once it was free. He was buried near Lushun prison instead, in a grave the Japanese authorities never confirmed. His remains have never been found. An empty mound at Hyochang Park in Seoul stands in for them. Japan annexed Korea outright five months after his death.

Why An Is Called a Genius

The claim is not military — the shooting was competent, not remarkable — and not scholarly in any conventional sense. It rests on an act of intellectual imagination performed under the worst possible conditions. A condemned man in a colonial prison spent his last months designing a regional order: a shared army, a shared currency and a standing peace among three countries then locked in conquest and resentment. He did it in 1910, four decades before the European institutions that embodied those ideas and ten years before the League of Nations. That a thirty-year-old provincial Korean with a mission education and self-taught Russian and French arrived at supranational federation on his own is striking, and Japanese scholars including Sasagawa Norikatsu have said so.

The counter-case should not be softened. Several of his fifteen justifications were factually wrong. Itō Hirobumi, whatever else he was, opposed immediate annexation, and his death removed the most senior brake on the hardliners; Korea was annexed within a year and, by the *Korea Times*' reckoning, more brutally than it might have been. Killing a man in a railway station is not an argument for peace, and the tension between An the pan-Asianist and An the nationalist assassin has never been resolved by his admirers so much as left unmentioned. *On Peace in East Asia* remains a fragment — a sketch, not a system. An possessed an original political mind that history gave four months to operate, having already spent his life on a bullet.

Legacy

South Korea awarded him the Order of Merit for National Foundation in 1962 and treats him as the foremost martyr of the independence movement; North Korea honours him in almost identical terms. China, which has its own uses for him, opened a memorial hall in Harbin in 2006 and a second in 2014, prompting the Japanese government to complain that it was "not conducive to building peace and stability" — the two readings of the same man, a century on, still irreconcilable. He has been the subject of films for sixty-five years, most recently *Harbin* in 2024. The treatise he could not finish is still being argued over, which is more than most finished books manage.