Island Life

Jeju Island, a ``Korean Hawaii,’’ a beautiful land of picturesque mountains, flower-covered fields, the imposing Mt. Halla, exotic customs and warm seas.

Female divers on Jeju Island

By Andrei Lankov

Jeju Island, a ``Korean Hawaii,’’ a beautiful land of picturesque mountains, flower-covered fields, the imposing Mt. Halla, exotic customs and warm seas. No wonder then that this beautiful island has become so popular among Korean and, increasingly, foreign tourists.

It is marketed as a paradise, and it feels like paradise, so few people are aware that for centuries the island was haunted by poverty, and that quite recently this idyllic land was the site of bloodshed on a scale with few parallels in world history.

It might sound surprising to a tourist, but for centuries Jeju used to be a place of exile. However, this is more logical than one would initially think. The azure seas around the island are actually quite dangerous for navigation, and it is not incidental that the Jeju coast has witnessed so many shipwrecks.

Prior to the development of large steamships in the late 1800s, traveling to and from the island was dangerous. The cross traffic between Jeju and the Korean Peninsula was limited, so a disgraced politician who was sent to Jeju would be completely and safely cut off from all centers of political and intellectual life, and thus rendered harmless and powerless.

It also helped that the Jeju inhabitants spoke a peculiar dialect, perhaps the most distinct of all Korean dialects. Under other circumstances, it would probably be described as a ``language’’ (the difference between a language and a dialect is rather arbitrary, as linguists and historians know very well). Indeed, nowadays islanders speak the standard Korean they learn at school and via TV, but a few decades ago the local speech was nearly incomprehensible to a native of Seoul. This reflects the island’s history, since until the 12th century it remained an independent state, and even following formal incorporation into Korea in 1105, for several centuries it continued to enjoy a high level of autonomy.

For centuries, the island economy depended on sea, since the land was not fertile. Men fished, while women dived to gather shellfish and seaweeds. The female divers of Jeju, the haenyo (literally, ``sea women’’) existed from at least the 17th century. The local population was seen as rebellious, and this sometimes created problems for the administrators, but in general Jeju remained a political and social backwater.

The colonial era brought some change. First of all, it was discovered that the local shellfish, gathered by haenyo divers, sold well in Japan. Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s when Jeju males began to move to Japan to work at factories, the females took up diving (at some point, one out of five Jeju women was a professional diver).

The work teams of the haenyo also went to other areas of Korea, to Japan and China, even to Russia where they dived for shellfish to be sold to Japanese consumers. After stints in foreign lands, the women usually returned home, but it was not always the case with males, so the island sex ratio began to change, with women increasingly outnumbering men.

In the colonial era the island was a locus of major strikes and riots, often organized by leftwing activists, with the most serious event occurring in 1948. After Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945, Jeju became one of the strongholds of communist radicalism. Tensions mounted, and in April 1948 violence erupted. Around that time the powerful Communist underground was undertaking attempts to prevent the first Korean elections, to be held in May 1948, and the Jeju Uprising was one of major parts of this plan.

The uprising began at dawn on April 3, 1948, when the local leftists attacked the houses of the local officials and slaughtered them with their families. Then, a determined guerrilla campaign began, which would continue until 1951-52. However, soon it was the local rightists and the government forces who made the most killings. Since most of the locals supported the ``reds,’’ the police and troops felt free to kill people on the slightest suspicion.

Radical historians sometimes describe the Jeju massacres as ``genocide.’’ Well, as both victims and perpetrators belonged to the same nation and ethnic group, I am not sure whether the term is applicable, but it undoubtedly was slaughter on a huge scale, even by the standards of the murderous 1940s, the worst time to be a Korean in the nation’s recorded history. Some 30,000 people or 15 percent of the total population died, largely at the hands of the Seoul troops (even though, admittedly, the communist guerillas did not miss an opportunity to kill as well). It was a higher percentage than, say, number of Poles or Russians killed during World War II.

The ``April 3rd Incident’’ as the bloody events came to be called, left deep scars. Animosity flourished on the Island, since more or less every islander knew both victims and perpetrators of atrocities, and many lost their family members, often through a betrayal by their own neighbors.

Many survivors were left terrified in the aftermath and steered clear of politics. For decades, the Jeju event was not to be discussed in public, and only in the 1980s did the ugly truth began to emerge (well, not 100 percent truth yet, since the events are still manipulated for political ends).

However, life continued. The slaughters further increased the gender imbalance, so there were five females for every four males on the island. Land remained poor, and even against the background of the general destitution of 1950s Korea, the Jeju situation looked especially bleak.

However, in the 1960s the island’s prospects began to improve. The island was saved from poverty by tourists and tangerines.

Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul.