Happy Independence Movement Day!

No school today...it's Korea's Independence Movement Day (Samil). It's sort of like the 4th of July...on March 1, 1919, the Korean independence movement began against Japan, which had taken control of Korea in 1910. Under Japanese rule, Koreans were no longer allowed to speak their language as the Japanese tried to assimilate them into Japanese culture. Korean rice was exported to Japan so many Koreans didn't have enough to eat, and it was all around a bad time for Koreans.

So on March 1, independence fighters announced Korea's declaration of independence from Japanese colonialism. The Japanese police and military forces responded by killing and injuring thousands of unarmed protestors. The movement didn't work that well--Japan still controlled Korea until 1945, at the end of WWII--but I guess that's a different story. Lots of Koreans, especially the older generation, still hate Japan, and there's still some tension between Japan and Korea (and China too) due to Japan's treatment of Koreans and Chinese in the past, in part because Koreans don't believe Japan has apologized properly and that Japan has whitewashed its actions and made the colonization seem like not such a bad thing.

I'm not sure how Koreans celebrate today (we'll celebrate by playing paintball [Joel] and copyediting [me]) , but Korean flags, called taegukki, are everywhere, sort of like on Veteran's Day in the US.

Everything on the Korean flag has meaning.