Movie distributor Kadokawa just announced that the Korean movie Harbin, which topped the South Korean box office for several weeks after it opened on Christmas Day, will be released theatrically in Japan on July 4, which is great news for the many fans of the movie’s star, Hyun Bin, who became an international heartthrob when he starred in the hit Netflix drama Crash Landing on You some years ago. It will not come as great news to Japan’s right wing stalwarts—or, then again, it might very well be great news since they seem to like nothing better than to drive their big Hinomaru-festooned trucks to the lairs of perceived enemies they can heckle with loudspeakers and patriotic war songs. In Harbin, Hyun Bin plays Ahn Jung-geun, an historically significant figure as a member of the anti-Japanese resistance just prior to Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula in 1910. The year before, Ahn assasinated Prime Minister and former Resident General of Korea Hirobumi Ito in the titular Chinese city, where Ito was meeting with the Russian finance minister to discuss the future of Korea. Ahn was captured and executed by the Japanese before being tried (he apparently had a way of evincing considerable sympathy from his jailers and thus had to be disposed of as quickly as possible). Consequently, Ahn is one of Korea’s national heroes, a status the movie plays up, while being described in Japan as a despicable terrorist, so you can be sure that when the film opens here those trucks will be out in force making it as difficult as possible for Hyun Bin’s fans to enjoy their idol’s performance. 

Coincidentally, another Korean independence martyr has been in the news lately, though you could be forgiven if you missed it. Yun Bong-gil was a resistance fighter during the colonial period who carried out a bombing at a park in Shanghai on the Japanese emperor’s birthday in 1932 that killed two Japanese officials and several civilians. Scholars say that Yun’s intention was to spark a war between Japan and China, a situation that came true later, though it’s difficult to blame or credit Yun for it. He was arrested almost immediately after the bombing, tried by a military court, and sentenced to death. Later that year he was executed in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, because it was the Ishikawa Division of the Imperial Army that occupied Shanghai at the time. In 1992, a group of Japan-resident Koreans erected a monument to Yun on the spot where his remains were supposedly buried, so, like Ahn, he is considered a hero in Korea and a terrorist in Japan, which still refuses, officially at least, to acknowledge that its colonial rule of the peninsula was improper or brutal. 

Earlier this year, residents of Kanazawa learned that a “memorial archive” dedicated to Yun would open in their city. The organizer of the archive has no links to the city or to any Korean groups who operate in the vicinity. The man behind the archive is Kim Gwang-man, a former documentarian for KBS, one of South Korea’s public broadcasters, who lives in South Korea. In interviews with Korean media he says that the facility is not so much a memorial to Yun as it is a resource center for information about the Hokuriku region’s connections to Korea. However, the Yun name guarantees that it will attract attention from anyone who knows who he is, and so far none of those parties, regardless of which side of the political divide they stand on, want the archive to open on its scheduled launch date of April 29, which happens to be the 93rd anniversary of the Shanghai bombing, meaning it’s also the late Showa Emperor’s birthday. If Kim really didn’t want people to associate his project with Yun, then he couldn’t have picked a worse day to start it.

Naturally, right wing elements swarmed to Kanazawa as soon as they found out. According to the local Kitaguni Shimbun, right wing truck protests have intensified as the opening date approaches. On March 30, the newspaper counted about 80 trucks and vans assembled from all over Japan in Kanazawa in order to protest the archive. Local residents had already discussed Kim’s plan and were opposed to it, not so much because of Yun and who he was, but because they knew right wingers wouldn’t stop making a nuisance of themselves as long as the archive was open. They insisted that Yun has no connection to the city other than the fact that he was put to death there. But since Kim and his backers reportedly bought the building in which the archive will be housed, there’s little that locals can do to stop it. 

Though several Korean media outlets have reported on the matter, the only mainstream Japanese media to cover it has been Sankei Shimbun, whose rightist leanings guarantee that anything they judge as being offensive behavior on the part of Koreans will be publicized. 

However, the archive is also being condemned by a group that one shouldn’t think would be against it: Mindan, the organization that represents the interests of South Korean residents in Japan. The Ishikawa branch of Mindan told Kitaguni Shimbun that it had nothing to do with Kim’s plan, and on April 4, the Mindan head office in Tokyo posted a message on its website saying that they did not support the archive since it has been developed without any input from local residents, be they Koreans or Japanese. The archive, in fact, was causing unrest in Kanazawa that Mindan said could harm relations between Koreans and Japanese in the area. 

Meanwhile, the April 29 opening has been postponed, but, according to Kim, not cancelled. He is still intent on launching the archive. 

Of course, right wingers will do what right wingers gotta do, which is incite hate speech against those they believe insult Japanese honor whenever detected; but Mindan’s clearly stated objections are more difficult to explain, especially since some local Korean residents, along with sympathetic Japanese, carry out a service at the Yun monument every year. And there are photos showing Mindan representatives attending these services, since the organization apparently had something to do with the monument’s installment. Perhaps the difference is the person responsible: Kim’s reasons and purposes for the archive can’t really be known until after it’s up and running, but by that time maybe all concerned parties will have lost interest.