Memorial events honoring Manhae Han Yong-un are being held one after another in mid-August, around Liberation Day. They are events that call up all at once the three layers of a man who lived as a monk, threw himself into the independence movement, and left behind poems. The eighty-first Liberation Day passed last weekend. In the same year, the Eulyu Liberation Monument also completed eighty years since it was erected.
The three layers do not join together well.
To bind dawn prayers, the cries of the manse demonstrations, and love poems written at night into one person's record, one of them has to be folded away. Honor him only as a monk and the poems are left over; honor him only as a fighter and the prose is left over. This year's events chose to place the three on a single stage rather than hold them in separate containers.
Manhae died in 1944. It was one year before liberation.
Eulyu is the sexagenary name for 1945, the year liberation came. The monument was raised in stone to harden that memory, and this year it passed eighty years.
Opinions differ over how to handle stone that has endured eighty years. To keep it as a relic, a rope must be strung around it and people kept back; to use it as the stage for memorial events, it must take in people and sound and footsteps. Both are said in the name of protecting memory, but the methods of protecting run in opposite directions. This year, with the 81st anniversary of liberation and the monument's eighty years falling in one season, that divide grows clearer.
A commemorative day ends in a day. What makes that day bearable are the hands that wipe the stone, pull the weeds and burn the incense, and even after the events end, it is mostly the people of that neighborhood who look after the monument.
The events end in mid-August, but the monument stands there afterward as well. Go when the people have gone and you can read the carved letters slowly. What that stone took down is decided by the person standing there reading.
Event Information
Date: Mid-August 2026
Program: Manhae Han Yong-un memorial events, events marking the 81st anniversary of liberation and the 80th anniversary of the erection of the Eulyu Liberation Monument
