By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
A Japanese-born Korean man, who was once jailed for the 1968 murder of two Japanese men in protest of discriminatory remarks against ethnic Koreans in Japan, died of prostate cancer Friday. He was 81.
Kwon Hee-ro was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 for shooting to death two Yakuza mobsters who called him a "Josenjin (Korean)" during a quarrel at a Shizuoka club on Feb. 20, 1968. Josenjin is considered a derogatory term by Koreans.
He was caught holding 13 hostages during an 88-hour standoff with the police at a nearby inn.
During the standoff, he demanded an apology from the Japanese police and asked the local media to express his motives for the murder, which he claimed was to expose the racial discrimination ethnic Koreans faced in Japan.
The incident was later made into a movie in South Korea in 1992.
Kwon was sent back to Korea and settled in his father's hometown of Busan in 1999. He was permanently banned from entering Japan.
Several days prior to his death, he reportedly had asked his supporters to cremate his body and bury some of the ashes next to his mother's tomb in Shizuoka.
According to a previous interview with Kyodo News Agency, Kwon was planning to file a petition to the Japanese authorities for a visit to Japan to pay respect to his mother's grave before he dies.
Born in 1928 to Korean parents in the Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan, Kwon grew up in poverty. In 1944, a year before Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945), Kwon and his family were mobilized as laborers for an underground air base.
He married in 1959 and ran a bar until he divorced in 1967.
Lee's funeral will be held Sunday at the Bongsaeng Hospital in Busan.