Chapter 3 Kapsan - My Birthplace
“I believe that some day it will be found that peasants are people.
Yes, beings in a great many respects like us. And I believe that some day they
will find this out, too - and then! Well, I think they will rise up and demand
to be rewarded as part of the race, and that by that consequence there will be
trouble.”
Mark Twain, Recollections of Joan of Arc:
I was born to a rich landowner family in Kapsan on January 15, 1935. My official birth date was recorded as November 15, 1935 due to a clerical error. I was the third son of Kim Chang Lim and Kim Kae Dong. Kapsan, literally meaning a "mountaintop", is situated near Mount. Baikdu, where anti-Japanese partisans, more commonly called guerrillas in America, used to camp. Mount. Baikdu is the tallest, 9,003 feet above sea level, mountain of Jangbaik Mountain Range. The area around the mountain, some 20 miles in length, is inhospitable and uninhabited. A crater lake, Chun-ji, sits on top of the mountain.
Figure kapmap.jpg: Where is Samsu-Kapsan? Courtesy of the US Army archives.
Today, Kapsan has secret military installations that include missile launch sites and nuclear storages. Kapsan refers to a county, Kapsan gun, that includes Mount Baiktu, a town by the same name, Kapsan myon, and Pochog-bo, a small village noted for Kim Il Sung's daring raid in the early 1940s, and Sam-su, another town noted for its many rivers.
The legend has it that beautiful angels descend from Heaven to bathe in the icy-cold lake and vicious dragons guard the angels, and that huge man-eating tigers roam the forest around the lake and attack anyone attempting to reach the mountaintop. Kapsan is famous for its remoteness and backwardness. Winters are cold and long. Its citizens were dirt poor in my days. The nearest civilization was the border town of Hyesan-jin, where jin stands for a port. Manchuria is on the other side of the Yalu River across a bridge at Hyesan.
My birthplace is referred to as Sam-su Kapsan, the harshest place to be in all of Korea. Samsu literally means three rivers and refers to the three rivers that flow out of Mount Baiktu: Yalu, Tumen and Songwha. Kapsan means the tallest mountain, referring to Mount Baiktu. Thus samsu-kapsan refers to the region of Korea that is the most sacred, the cradle of Korean civilization. In this region, there exist a town called Kapsan and another called Samsu.
It is Korea's Siberia. During the Yi Dynasty, Kapsan was a border garrison town. Political prisoners were exiled there to man the fort. This was the place for the officials in disgrace. The fort, a large pile of huge stones about five stories high, was built about one thousand years ago to stop marauding bandits from Manchuria, and its base is still standing. My great, great grandfather was the last commander of the garrison, which was disbanded in 1905 by the Japanese. His sword and helmet are still preserved in a shrine at our family burial ground near Kapsan.
Life was hard for most of the Kapsan inhabitants due to ever-present starvation and extreme cold. If you relieved yourself in the open, the urine would freeze by the time it hit the ground! And hard labor, tigers, wolves, the Japanese police, opium addiction, poor sanitation and diseases, only one Western medical doctor, a medical school dropout, was in town, and a myriad of other curses killed the Kapsanese.
Particularly bad was personal hygiene and sanitation. Drinking water was drawn from open wells. People defecated into shallow holes dug into ground during the day, much like an American outhouse. During the night, night chambers were used for urine and feces. In the morning, the chambers were emptied into the yard or on the street. My grandmother washed her face with her urine; she believed that it kept her face young and shiny. Few people lived beyond the age of 50 in Kapsan. Most roads in Kapsan were ox cart tracks in use since the days of the Huns many centuries ago. The vast majority of the Kapsan residents had never seen a car, train, electricity or newspaper. More than ninety percent could not read or write.
Ironically, Kapsan is rich in natural resources. There was a copper mine that dates back to 1782 and the Gulf of America explored Kapsan's resources in the 1890s. The Gu-gen Company of Japan modernized the mining operation and extracted more than 10,000 tons of copper from 1914 to 1939. After the Korean War, the mines were further expanded. Kapsan has large deposits of calcium, uranium and other minerals.
My father fell in love and married the farm girl who brought him back from his death throe. She was 10 years older than my father, as it was the custom in the olden days. Girls did not receive school education, because the main reason for their being was to raise children and do house chores for their husbands. Women were basically beasts of burden and baby makers. On the other hand, "man-childs" were valued, since they could help out with the farm work, and those women who bore "man-childs" were prized and respected.
Figure
8. My parents – Kim Chang Lim and Kim Gae Ddong. My mother is holding my
brother Kim Ung Sik, aged 2.
circa 1930.
While recuperating in the care of my mother, he saw a vision, why not take advantage of the Japanese and do some good deed for the poor Korean farmers. The Japanese were eager to produce more foods and were willing to help out anyone with novel ideas. Kapsan sits on a plateau surrounded by high mountains. Several rivers flow out of the mountains and cut through the rocky plateau. There were acres and acres of flat land, but they lacked water for crops. The farmers had worked small patches of land along the rivers for centuries, and many slash and burn migrant farmers eked out substandard living by clearing patches of forest for a crop and then moved onto another patch.
My father saw a golden opportunity: why not build irrigation canals and supply water to remote barren land? He saw green rice fields in places where only thorn bushes grew. He wrote up a business plan and approached a Japanese development company for land development grants. The Japanese loved my father’s plan and agreed to give him whatever he needed. My father established the Kapsan Irrigation Farming Cooperative, Kapsan Suri Jo-ahp. He also founded the Korea-Manchuria Development Corporation, Sun-Man Tak-ji Hoe-sa, located in Sin-sul-dong, Seoul, Korea. Kim Chul, a close friend of the family, managed the corporation when my father was away.
He brought in my cousin, Kim Jung Sik, the fisherman’s son from Sam Ho, to supervise the canal construction. He bought several thousand acres of barren land dirt-cheap from the Japanese, hired a Japanese civil engineer and Korean laborers by the hundreds. Since the Japanese Imperial Army was eager to secure more sources of rice, they put pressure on my father to complete the canals as fast as possible. The Japanese brought in truckloads of dynamite, cement and other construction materials on a top priority basis.
Giant hand-operated sluices controlled the flow of the water from the Huchung River into canals. The sluices were lowered to reduce the flow and raised to increase the flow. Two wheels, one on each side of a sluice, were turned by a couple of strong men. The irrigation canals were miles long. The canals were built above ground with dirt, rocks and cement. Extensive dynamiting was required at many locations.
Figure
9. The US 7th Infantry crossing Huh-chun-gang. My father built canals
taking water from this river. Courtesy: The US Army archives.
Several thousands of acres of land, previously barren, were turned into golden-rich rice paddies. My father owned much of the newly formed farms. And, in fact, he legally and physically owned the farm villages, too. The canals were more than for farming to the villagers. The villagers along the canals did bathing, laundry and fishing in the canals for free, although the farmers had to pay my father twenty to thirty percent of their crops for the water. Early in the fall, the sluices were lowered to the bottom and the canals were emptied for the duration of the winter. This was a feast time for the farmers, because the canals were full of tasty fat eels, crayfish, catfish and carps. They were easy picking and free for all.
Father became the richest man in North Korea. His was truly a “rags to riches” story. He built a huge two-story 10-bedroom house, only one outhouse for some reason, for his family and a modern office building for his company. His office building had a large storage bin for the rice and other farm produce he collected from his tenants. At the harvest time, caravans of ox-carts loaded down with foodstuff trekked to his warehouse. His library was full of books and magazines from Japan, China, Russia and Germany.
By this time, my father had sired four sons and one daughter with my mother. Their first son was named Kim Ung Sik. He was the brightest, and being the eldest, the most reliable. The number two son was named Kim Sung Sik. He was the favorite of my father, probably because he was ill most of his short life. When he was five years old, he fell off a swing and broke some ribs. His brain was also bruised. My father took him to the best medical doctors in all of Korea, China and Japan, all in vain.
Figure
10. My brothers: from left to right – Kim Sung Sik, Kim Young Sik (me) and Kim
Ung Sik, circa 1937.
Father found a Western medical doctor in Seoul, who claimed that he could cure Sung Sik’s illness and so my father bought a house in Seoul. He let an old communist friend of his to live in it, rent-free. This man was among the many communists killed by Rhee Syngman in 1948. The South Korean police confiscated the house.
Father tried both Western and Oriental medicine on my sick brother. There was a famous Chinese medical doctor in Manchuria and my father spent a fortune for his services. Once in a while, I got to go along on their trips to Manchuria. People say China is crowded, but the vast cornfields of Manchuria stretched over the horizon as far as I could see. To my uninitiated eyes, the Chinese medical doctor’s office was a spooky house with all sorts of stinking parts of dead animals.
I did like the Chinese food. My father took us to the best restaurants in town and ordered the best they had to offer. My favorite was steam buns, the plain kind. They were brought out steaming hot, about the size of American buns. My father liked to drink bbae-ju, a Chinese liquor with enough alcohol to burn. He drank this stuff like a fish. He liked to take it down with his favorite dish of boiled female pig sex organs shredded in small pieces.
Father was a firm believer in the Chinese medicine. He bought all sorts of elixirs from Chinese medicine men and forced them on us. Dried bear galls were used for stomach problems. Tiger bones were ground up and mixed in with tea. Deer antlers were boiled until they became jelly-like and eaten like jellies. Ginseng roots were soaked in honey and eaten like tough, chewy candies.
Kapsan is famous for its opium fields, located on the slope of Mount. Baekdu, a dormant volcano. Its volcanic soil and high altitude are ideal for opium cultivation, Ginseng and hops for bee. Korean farmers were paid to grow opium poppies for Japan's opium operations in China. The China Affairs Board of Japan ran this secret opium business. The board was responsible for political, economic, and cultural affairs in occupied China and the opium raised in Korea and Taiwan was one the main weapon of conquest of China.
The Japanese opium business in Kapsan was supposed to be a top secret, but all locals knew where the fields were and who ran the operation. The old-timers said that the fields originated way back in time, and that the Japanese did not start the business. The only thing the Japanese had done was to expand the farm acreage and to organize it into a modern business. The Korean farmers were paid handsomely for their poppy crops. Some of the growers and their friends were addicted to the drug.
Figure poppies.jpg. Open plant flowers are strikingly beautiful. Opium is extracted from the seed pods after the flowers are gone.
Opium plants grow well in cornfields. The seed pots are about the size of my fist. Farmers would make four to five horizontal cuts on the seed pots and white gooey substance oozed out a day or two later. This gooey substance was scraped into a bucket and then mixed with certain chemicals. The resulting black candy-like mixture was shaped into brick-size blocks and wrapped in wax paper. The exact weight, date and the name of the manufacturer were carefully written on each block of opium. The finished goods were shipped to Manchuria or wherever. Japanese police guarded the whole process and guarded against theft of this valuable commodity. However, there was a thriving opium smuggling business with stolen opium blocks.
The Japanese said that Kim Il Sung was behind the illegal opium trafficking and that his supporters had opium plots hidden in the immense forests on the slope of Mount. Baikdu. I suppose Kim Il Sung needed money badly and the opium business was one way to raise cash. Gen. Kim Gyong Chul openly traded in opium to buy war supplies. Kim collected "protection" money from opium growers and smugglers. After all, the Japanese were doing it, so why not Kim Il Sung?
After the opium harvest was over, the opium plant seeds were dried in the sun. The dried seeds were eaten like popcorns. The more you ate, the more you wanted the tasty stuff. If you ate enough of the seeds, you would get drowsy and do funny things. The seeds were also used in various dishes for their euphoric after-effect. One thing about the opium plant, the flowers are really beautiful; they look like the Rose of Sharon, the Korean national flower, Moo-goong-wha.
Opium was in great demand in Manchuria and there was a fairly active black market for opium. We had a sizable number of drug addicts in our town in spite of the fact that the Japanese police jailed the addicts and executed smugglers. Nevertheless, the black market flourished and new and more ingenuous smugglers replaced those who were caught and executed. The smugglers found all sorts of ways to fool the Japanese police. One young woman was caught carrying a dead baby stuffed with opium on her back. Another woman was caught with her vagina filled with the stuff. Some swallowed plastic bags of opium. Some made sweets and cakes of opium and peddled them disguised as Kapsan native foods.
Kapsan was said to be the
birthplace of communist revolutionaries. It is easy to see why. Kapsan was the
poorest town in Korea and the partisans' families were among the poorest in
Kapsan. Most Kapsan peasants lived a life that even a beast would not envy, the
very same type of people Mark Twain refers to in his Recollections
of Joan of Arc: “I believe that some day it will be found that peasants are people.
Yes, beings in a great many respects like us. And I believe that some day they
will find this out, too - and then! Well, I think they will rise up and demand
to be rewarded as part of the race, and that by that consequence there will be
trouble.”
The unemployed did not get much help from the employed, who could barely feed their own family. Jobs were very scarce in Kapsan. There were government jobs, such as teachers, tax collectors, dogcatchers, forestry service, police informants, military and police members. Seasonal jobs were available at my father's land development company, opium farms and a Japanese-owned hops plantation.
Figure hingbum3.jpg: Hong Bom Do, a famous yi-bung, people's army general. A poor tiger hunter and a coal miner of Kapsan. Courtesy: Korean Independence Hall.
Kapsan had its share of barbers, Chinese medicine men, human-waste honey-bucket collectors, who emptied the dung-filled holes in the ground and sell the 'night soil' to farmers, firewood vendors, fortune-tellers, who doubled as funeral 'directors', and other petty occupations. Young women worked as maids or concubines for the 'wealthy' Koreans and Japanese. The only kinds of people making big bucks were drug dealers, black marketers of war-time contrabands, landowners, loan sharks and Korean informants who were paid handsome sums of money for spying on their fellow countrymen for the Japanese.
My favorite was the traveling scrap iron man. He pushed a small cart collecting anything made of iron, knives, utensils, hammers and ornaments. In return, he gave you Korean candies such as 'yut', similar to hard chocolates. The guy would ring a bell and yell, "scraps, scraps for sweets!", and kids, including myself, would steal their mom's best knives and scissors for the delicacy. The scrap man made up with the ladies by sharpening their knives and scissors free.
Gen. Hong Bom Do is one of the most famous sons of Kapsan. He was
born in 1868 in North Pyong-ahn Province. Early in his childhood, he moved to
Kapsan and made a living by hunting tigers and working at coal mines. In 1907, the Japanese made it
illegal for Koreans to possess firearms. Hong was outraged by this decree and formed an
anti-Japanese guerrilla force with his fellow hunters. His guerrilla unit
fought the Japanese troops in Kapsan, Samsu, Hyesan and Pungsan.
In June 1920, the Japanese 19th Division mounted a major offensive aimed at wiping out the Independence Army based at Bong-oh-dong. Hong, commanding a force of 700 men, scored a major victory over the Japanese at the Battle of Bong-oh-dong, in which his troops killed more than 120 Japanese troops.
Figure hongbum4.jpg: Hong Bom Do in China. Note the Mauser pistol, a deadly submachine gun, popular with the Korean fighters. Courtesy Korean History Archives.
Four months later, he commanded
the First Regiment of the North Route Army of the Korean Provisional Government
at the Chung-san-ri battle, Gen.
Kim Jwa Jin commanded the Second Regiment and Gen. Choe Jin commanded the Third
Regiment. The battle raged from October 21st to 26th in the
vicinity of the Paikdu Mountain. There were at least 10 major clashes. The Azma
Unit of the Japanese Army had 5,000 men equipped with canon and heavy machine guns. In
contrast, the Koreans had 700 men, 4 machine guns, 500 rifles, 1,000 grenades
and 20 horse-wagons. More than 1,000 Japanese were killed or wounded in this
famous battle.
In 1921, in face of intense Japanese pursuit, Hong’s army moved to the safety of Siberia. In June, the Red Army in the Free City Incident decimated his army. He escaped to Northern Manchuria and joined forces with Yi Don Whi and later, returned to Siberia. There he became a Communist and spent years training new Korean military officers.
Figure
11. Gen. Hong Bom Do (center) with aids in Siberia. Courtesy: ROK History Archives
The old tiger hunter turned freedom fighter was relocated to Kazakhstan by Stalin and died there in 1943 of natural causes. He was awarded a presidential medal for independence in 1962.
Figure hong-grave.jpg: Gen. Hong's grave at Kril Oruda, Kazakhstan, Central Asia. Many songs, dramas and novels have been written on Gen. Hong, and he is one of the most revered military commanders in South Korea. Courtesy, Korean Independence Hall.
The earliest childhood memory I can dredge up now goes back to the happy days when I was five. All was well then. Of the many happy and carefree events of those days, I miss the picnics the most. Kapsan was surrounded by tall mountains and a crystal clear river, Huh-chung River, skirts the town, and naturally, there were two kinds of picnics: one on mountains and on the river. Mount Jang-pyong was the tallest and almost everything of any importance went by Jang-pyong. Thus, my school was called Jang-pyong elementary, not Kapsan elementary, although there was only one elementary school in those days. I was told this was because Kapsan was hard for the Japanese to pronounce.
Mountain picnics were all-day affairs. We got up early at the crack of dawn and walked several miles to Mount Jangpyong, which rose steeply. There were all sorts of wild flowers and tall trees there. There were water falls and streams here and there. There were colorful birds and animals everywhere. The grownups carried sacks of rice, vegetables and huge cooking pots on their back. One of them carried me on his back. They also carried several live chickens in a basket. As soon as we reached the summit, the cooks gathered firewood and started cooking. My father and his friends climbed down a steep gully by a spring and drank rice wine. The kids were not allowed down to the spring because the path to it was narrow and slippery. One misstep and you met your Maker in a hurry. I was content with watching the adults singing and dancing around laughing like so many kids.
The main attraction of a picnic was eating, especially foods cooked right there on the mountains. For some reason, the mountain-cooked foods tasted much better than mother's lowland foods. In addition to the ingredients from home, the cooks added various wild plants and roots to their pots. Occasionally, they caught pheasants, rabbits, and other animals and added special "wild" tastes to our meals. When the cooking was done, father and his guests climbed up to the summit and enjoyed the delicacies, after which they fell sleep of a siesta. Going home was anti-climax, with our only concern being to get off the mountain before it got dark.
River picnics were less arduous because Huhchun River was right by the town and there was not climbing. The cooks carried rice and some vegetables, but no chickens, because the main highlight of a river picnic was the fresh fish from the river. The cooks carried large steel hammers, in addition to cooking tools. Young guys with big muscles wielded heavy hammers striking rocks under which fish hid. A couple of strikes and the stunned fish floated belly up for easy picking. While the men caught fish, the women and kids hunted for crayfish. They hid beneath small rocks and we caught them with bare hands. The crayfish were fairly large in size and had two large sharp claws that could do some serious damages.
We swam in the cold clean waters of Huchung River while the cooks cleaned their catch and cooked our meals. My father and his guests, of course, drank rice wine with side dishes of garlic, green onion, and raw fish dipped in hot pastes. My favorite fish was eels, which had more fats and less bones than other kinds of fish. Eels do look like snakes, but they are not. Eels have a large mouth that help them suck bloods out of other fish. My father did eat, or rather drank, snakes. He would put a live snake into a bottle of wine and acids, and let it sit for a month or two, by which time, the poor snake had been dissolved.
My school had school picnics, too, but they were more educational than for fun and eating. We walked miles to a historical site or an educational place and listened to boring lectures, after which we ate our lunch packed by our dear mothers. Our lunch usually consisted of Korean-style sushi, boiled eggs, dried fish and some fruits. For deserts, we had yut, hard Korean candies, dried cod eyeballs, dried cuttlefish and such. I hated the school picnics but all kids had to go. Long walks, rain or shine, to a distant primitive locations that lacked sanitary facilities were no fun for me.
I had my own brand of picnics. I would pack my lunch box with bakes potatoes, fruits and dried squids and then talk a couple of my friends into coming along. We shied away from the mountains where child-eating animals and monsters lurked and walked a mile or so onto fields of wild flowers and tasty roots. A neighbor showed me where to locate edible sweet roots and we filled our little stomachs with fresh roots of Heaven. Cold baked potatoes dipped in honey were gourmet for hungry kids after a long walk of a mile away from home. We had fun looking for birds nests, fish in the rivulets that crisscrossed the fields, and most of all, we enjoyed being free in harmony of Mother Nature, with no adults telling us what to do.
For more information on Hong Bom Do, see
1) http://chaos.suwon.ac.kr/~hwpark/rusia/rusiapho.htm Prof. Park Whan, Suwon University, Photo Archives
2) http://1109.co.kr/home/history/history_korea/bongo.htm Hong Bom Do in the Bong-oh-dong Battle
3) http://soback.kornet21.net/~sk9505/inmool/cho36.html General Hong Bom Do
4) http://www.independence.or.kr/unisql/dispatcher/indeman/indeman_detail.html?id=p0079 Hong Bom Do, Hall of Fame Independece Fighters.
5) http://user.chollian.net/~mdle3/pds/hbd.htm Hong Bom Do
6) http://my.dreamwiz.com/rho2580/hong_byumdo.htm Encyclopedia of Famous Koreans
7) http://www.tgedu.net/student/tfokuk/html/text/il1053.html Newspaper article on the Bongoh-dong Battle
8) http://www.independence.or.kr/exhibition/1995/1995-023.htm Korean Armed Groups in Manchuria
9) http://www.dalgu.net/55815/w-24.htm The Bongoh-dong Battle
10) http://solnuri.hihome.com/literature/sanmoon/j/j-8.htm The Visitors, A novel on Hong Bom Do's soliders.
11) http://user.chollian.net/~mdle3/pds/bongoh.htm Newspaper article on the Bongoh-dong Battle
12) http://jungto.org/gf/kor/min/book18.htm History of the Bongoh Dong Battle
13) http://www.independence.or.kr/exhibition/1995/1995-046.htm Bongoh-dong battle area photos today.
For information on Kapsan, see:
1) http://www.deungsan.pe.kr/essay7.html Samsu Kapsan
2) http://www.naramal.com/02unmun/hyundae/samsugapsan.htm Samsu Kapsan - A Poem
3) http://nongae.gsnu.ac.kr/~jcyoo/reread/san.html On the way to Samsu Kapsan
4) http://www.m2000.co.kr/week/991223/1223131.html Lee Ung Soo on Kapsan
Bongsu study. States that "sam-su" refers to Huh-chung, Heysan and Hu-myon, the three rivers that merge to form the Yalu River.