[Opinion] Heroic Lee Soo-hyun

“Many people have been sacrificed because of the highly built wall between the two countries, but in the year 2001, tens of thousands of Japanese people grieved over a valuable sacrifice made by a Korean. Even as fellow Japanese, it might have not been easy to throw oneself to save a drunk person lying on a railway as a train rushed towards them. But, he threw himself in a matter of a second or two. He was an angel coming down to earth to save its pitiable people,” wrote Asuna Mizuho, a young Japanese writer, three years ago in memory of Lee Soo-hyun.

Ms. Mizuho solaces the parents who lost their son in the same writing, “Your son has gone to the heaven, but he will remain always in the hearts of the Japanese people.” This was not a simple rhetorical flourish. Three years have passed since Lee passed away at the Shinokubo Station in Tokyo, but the flowers at his cemetery in the Busan Municipal Park never cease to wilt with relentless Japanese visitors. There is also a glass box with 1,000 paper cranes and a hand-carved wood figurine left by one of them.

With industrialization and urbanization came isolation from our neighbors. There are voices within the Japanese society which lament the individualism of the Japanese people who neglect people being robbed or dying on the street. The heroic deed done by a Korean young man, not by a Japanese but a “third-country national,” came as a great shock and left a deep impression on the wry Japanese society. The Japanese press sent out a large-scale message of national education saying that the selfish Japanese young should learn from this Korean young man.

Some views in Korea, which had suffered under the Japanese ruling, do not take this movement of the Japanese to the memory of the young man as it is. Some criticism point out that it is an emotional complicity mixed with nationalism and humanism. However, Lee did not have a moment to think about the nation as he instinctively threw himself to save a drunk person while facing a train coming at him. It was only his humanistic mind apparatus that worked instantly which instructed him to save a human in danger. There is no time for a race or a nation to fiddle in such situation. Both the Koreans and the Japanese should learn a lesson from the heroic Lee that humanism precedes nationalism. That is how we should memorialize the third anniversary of the death of Lee Soo-hyun.

Editorial Writer Hwang Ho-taek, hthwang@donga.com