The Osan School was a nationalist school established by Yi Sung Hun, who was active in the independence movement. Not only was the Japanese language not taught, but students were actually forbidden to speak Japanese. I had a different opinion on this. I felt that we had to know our enemy if we were to defeat it. I took another transfer exam and entered the fourth grade of the Jung-ju Public Normal School. In public schools, all classes were conducted in Japanese, so I memorized katakana and hiragana the night before my first day of class. I didn’t know any Japanese, so I took all the textbooks from grades one through four and memorized them over the course of two weeks. This enabled me to start understanding the language.

       By the time I graduated from grammar school, I was fluent in Japanese. On the day of my graduation, I volunteered to give a speech before a gathering of all the important people in Jung-ju. Normally in that situation, the student is expected to speak about his gratitude for the support received from his teachers and the school. Instead, I referred to each of my teachers by name and critiqued them, pointing out problems in the way the school was run. I also spoke on our time in history and the kind of determination that people in responsible positions should make. I gave this rather critical speech entirely in Japanese.

       “Japanese people should pack their bags as soon as possible and go back to Japan,” I said. “This land was handed down to us by our ancestors, and all the future generations of our people must live here.”

       I said these things in front of the chief of police, the county chief, and town mayor. I was taking after the spirit of Great-Uncle Yun Guk Moon and saying things that no one else dared say. The audience was shocked. When I left the stage, I could see people’s faces had turned pale. Nothing happened to me that day, but there were problems later on. From that day, the Japanese police marked me as a person to be tracked and began watching me, making a nuisance of themselves. Later, when I was trying to go to Japan to continue my studies, the chief of police refused to place his stamp on a form that I needed, and this caused me some trouble. He regarded me as a dangerous person who should not be allowed to travel to Japan and refused to stamp the form for me. I had a big argument with him and finally convinced him to put his stamp on the form. Only then could I go to Japan.