On Sunday I went to the celebration of the 99th anniversary of An Chunggun killing Ito Hirobumi (see the previous entry for a bit more information). The event itself lasted for about an hour but I went to lunch with the director of the An Chunggun memorial hall afterwards. The ceremony itself was really interesting and well done. There were a few speeches and some kids were given prizes for the essays they wrote on An. It ended with an older fellow leading the crowd in shouts of mansei (literally 10,000 years, most people are familiar with the more commonly known Japanese pronunciation--banzai). It began with the national anthem and there was a military band to play it. There were a couple of things that were different from how such a thing would have been done in the states. For example, a guy did a saxophone solo with accompanying computer music in honor of An.
The other thing that really caught my attention is in the following video. Some elementary school kids came out and sang a couple of songs. The song they are singing in the video is simply titled "An Chunggun" and describes An killing Ito. They are holding Korean flags. If you look closely you will notice there are black handprints on their shirts. When An Chunggun took an oath with some others to fight the Japanese he cut off the joins of one of his fingers and wrote with his blood on a flag. That is why the hand is missing a joint. While An was in prison during his trial and while he was waiting for his execution he did a lot of calligraphy and would always put his handprint on his work so that became his kind of mark. So that is why the kids have it on their chests.
To give you an idea of how important An is, the flowers on the extreme left were donated by the president.
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