By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
The late Korean independence activist Shin Chae-ho (1880-1936) will get a family register 73 years after his death, the government said Sunday.
About 300 of his colleagues who fought against Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945) will also receive registers on April 13, the 90th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean Provisional Government, in Shanghai in 1919.
It is in acknowledgement of the legacies of the pro-independence fighters and to reward them with the legal Korean nationality they had craved, the Ministry of Patriots and Veteran Affairs said.
Shin remained stateless by refusing registration under Japanese rules, but after the liberation in 1945, the Korean government inherited the Japanese system from which he and his family were omitted.
According to Shin's daughter-in-law, Lee Deok-nam, Shin's offspring managed to get a register afterward, but without his name on it. ``When we went to an administrative office in 1970, and a staff member told me that my husband was officially fatherless because there was no father in the book,'' she said.
It was only last year that the National Assembly revised a bill to allow independence fighters to have family registers posthumously. About 300 are subject to the rule.
Shin, also a historian and founder of the national historiography, is best known for two books, Doksa Shillok (A New Reading of History) and Joseon Sanggosa (The Early History of Joseon). He laid out the first ethnic-based linear national history of Korea in the books, opposing then-conventional Sino-centric Confucian historiography.
While exploring the world of Minjok, or ethnicity, he held positions in the provisional government. He was arrested in Taiwan while raising funds for his movement and died in prison.
He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Order of Merit for National Foundation in 1962.