Sung Jae-gi

Sung Jae-gi: The Activist Who Bet His Life on a Bridge

On Thursday 25 July 2013, a 45-year-old man in Seoul posted a message telling the public that he intended to jump off one of the twenty-four bridges over the Han River. It was not a farewell note. It was a fundraising appeal: his organisation was 100 million won in debt — around $90,000 — and he wanted the money. "Dear citizens," he wrote, "I plan to jump off a bridge over the Han River. I hope you give us a last chance." To those who told him he would die, he answered: "Why do you all assume that jumping off the bridge will kill me? I have complete confidence in my survival." The next evening he jumped from Mapo Bridge. His body was recovered three days later.

From Insurance to Ideology

Sung Jae-gi was born on 11 September 1967. His early working life had nothing to do with politics: he sold insurance in his twenties, briefly ran a business of his own, and in 2006 was operating a nightclub in Daegu. Somewhere in that period the grievance that would define him took hold, and he redirected himself entirely into activism.

His organisational output was prolific. In 2006 he founded the Association of Anti-Feminism for the Liberation of Men. In 2007 came the Association for the Abolition of the Ministry of Women — an entire pressure group whose single purpose was to dissolve a government department. The vehicle that outlasted the others was Man of Korea, which by 2013 counted several thousand members and made him the most visible masculinist in South Korea.

The Case He Made

Sung's central complaint was structural and, in its narrowest form, checkable: he argued that women's organisations in South Korea received government support out of all proportion to anything available to men, and that a cabinet-level ministry existed to represent one sex and none to represent the other.

His signature issue was conscription. South Korean men serve; South Korean women do not. A system awarding bonus points in public-service examinations to veterans had partially compensated for that asymmetry, and Sung campaigned in 1999 against its abolition. When the Constitutional Court struck it down in October 2001, he spent years arguing for its restoration. Around this core he built a wider platform: opposition to restrictions on pornography, campaigns against women-only facilities, and a general insistence that Korean men were the unacknowledged losers of the country's modernisation.

He also said things that were simply cruel, and said them deliberately. On the birth rate, he told Korean women: "You should be ashamed of yourselves. Why are you making such a fuss about menstruating when the nation's birthrate is the lowest in the world?" Provocation was not incidental to the method. It was the method.

The Shelter

There is a part of the record that complicates the caricature. Alongside the polemics, Sung ran a shelter and a job-placement service for men in genuine trouble: the homeless and long-term unemployed, male runaways, and gay and transgender men — a constituency that sat oddly with the anti-feminist banner he marched under, and that few other organisations in Seoul were serving. Whatever else he was, he was running a service that cost money and produced no headlines. It was that operation's debt, in the end, that he went to the river to pay off.

The Last Week

By July 2013 the finances had become untenable and his personal life had come apart; his wife had left him earlier that month. The stunt he devised was of a piece with everything he had done before — extreme, public, and structured as a dare to an audience he believed was ignoring him.

The public response was the one he had spent years courting and the one he could not survive. It was largely indifferent, and where it was not indifferent it was contemptuous: commenters called the appeal ridiculous and told him to go ahead and jump. He did. Two colleagues were present at Mapo Bridge and photographed him going into the water. Police later questioned them over whether they had aided and abetted a suicide; the colleagues insisted the plan had only ever been a publicity stunt.

The search at Mapo Bridge ran three days and was called off. At 4:10 p.m. on Monday 29 July, his body surfaced near Bam Island, close to the southern side of Seogang Bridge, which links Yeouido to northern Seoul.

Why Sung Is Called a Genius

The word does not apply to Sung Jae-gi in any intellectual sense, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. He produced no research, no book that anyone cites, and no argument that survives contact with a serious critic. His public statements were often crude and sometimes contemptible.

What he had, and had in unusual measure, was a promoter's instinct — an intuitive grasp of how attention actually moves. He understood a decade before it became conventional wisdom that a grievance shared by half a population could be organised into a movement if someone was willing to say the unsayable first. Starting with nothing but nerve, he built three organisations, put men's-rights politics onto the national agenda of a country where it had no vocabulary, and made himself unavoidable. That is a real and rare capability, and it is closer to the talent of an agitator or a showman than to that of a thinker.

It is also the capability that killed him. The escalation logic he lived by — outrage the public, get louder when ignored — has no ceiling, and he rode it off a bridge for roughly $90,000. Read honestly, his life is less a case for genius than a case study in what happens when tactical brilliance about attention is uncoupled from judgement, self-knowledge, and any way of being heard other than shocking people. His own last words on the subject — complete confidence in his survival — are the summary. He had spent years being right about how to be noticed and wrong about almost everything else, including the water.

Legacy

The death did not stay contained. August 2013 saw a reported month-long rise in copycat suicides in South Korea, and the case became a reference point in Korean argument about the ethics of spectacle activism and about who bears responsibility when a stunt turns fatal. Man of Korea outlived its founder, but Sung's more lasting mark is the space he cleared. He gave a set of grievances a public vocabulary in a country that had not had one for them, and set the confrontational terms on which they would afterwards be argued. He also demonstrated, conclusively and at his own expense, the limit of that method.

Achievements

• Educated at Yeungnam University
• Worked as human rights defender, entrepreneur and autobiographer