By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
A memorial statue of Yoon Bong-gil, an independence fighter during Japan's colonial rule, will be erected in North Korea next year.
Hwang Eui-man, the head of the memorial foundation for Yoon, said the statue will be built in Seoncheon, North Pyeongan Province, where he was arrested and imprisoned for 45 days in 1930.
Yoon was an independence fighter and was involved in an attempt to assassinate the Japanese emperor. In 1932, he detonated a bomb disguised as a food package at a Japanese army event to celebrate Emperor Hirohito's birthday in Shanghai, which killed a general, a government chancellor and many officials of the Japanese Empire. He was immediately arrested and later executed.
Hwang explained the contents of the statue will focus on Yoon's life in the North.
Yoon's stories in the South, Japan and China are relatively well known. His life in the North, however, is not. Only a few facts he wrote to his family are left.
For the project, members of the foundation will visit the North around September or October to trace his activities. They will collaborate with the Unification Ministry.
The initial plan was to visit earlier, but due to the inter-Korean summit scheduled for Aug. 28-30, it was held back. Since the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung referred several times to Yoon's achievements, it is highly likely that they would unfold the project there, Hwang said.
They also plan to make a TV documentary on him and hope to record some video clips there.
``He was not only an independence activist, but also a good scholar. He worked hard to educate farmers and was good at Chinese literature. This project will show some other aspects of Yoon that we did not know,'' he said. Currently, there are memorial statues of Yoon in Shanghai where he threw the bomb, and in Kanazawa, Japan, where he was executed.